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A Quantum Leap for the Web

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Re: A Quantum Leap for the Web

#21
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Servo has always been and still is a research project. It was never intended to go into production as a fully-fledged Mozilla product. Quantum is the initiative to bring a lot of those technologies into Gecko.

> Servo has always been and still is a research project. It was never intended to go into production as a fully-fledged Mozilla product. That's not true. Servo is designed to be production-grade.

To elaborate on this "production grade" comment, Quantum is using the same code that's in Servo. I think the fact we were able to build a production grade style system so quickly (and that is 4x faster!) is a testament to the advantages of Rust.

Re: A Quantum Leap for the Web

#23

Heh. It's interesting to me that in the vernacular a quantum leap is a large change while in physics it's a very quick, extremely tiny event.

No, in both it's a discrete change. It just happens to be that in physics most discrete changes are at a small scale.

Re: A Quantum Leap for the Web

#25
post #10

Does anyone know how this compares to the current implementations of competing browsers? ie. is Firefox still playing catch up in some respects or is this leaps ahead of the competition too?

I think performance of the style systems in Blink and Firefox are similar. Since Servo's style system is linearly scalable, we expect most users to get a ~4x speed improvement on styling. Users's don't care specifically about style performance, though, but about things like interactivity. We think Servo's style system will improve those things, but don't have numbers for that on hand. To give a concrete example, it t…

How does WebKit's JITing style system compare? (As far as I'm aware, nobody else has anything like it, though it is still single-threaded as far as I'm aware.)

Re: A Quantum Leap for the Web

#26
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Servo has always been and still is a research project. It was never intended to go into production as a fully-fledged Mozilla product. Quantum is the initiative to bring a lot of those technologies into Gecko.

> Servo has always been and still is a research project. It was never intended to go into production as a fully-fledged Mozilla product. That's not true. Servo is designed to be production-grade.

> That's not true. Servo is designed to be production-grade.

I never said that it wasn't. I said that it wasn't going to be shipped as a production Mozilla product.

Re: A Quantum Leap for the Web

#28

Heh. It's interesting to me that in the vernacular a quantum leap is a large change while in physics it's a very quick, extremely tiny event.

No! This meme is just wrong (and it does grind my gears to an unreasonable amount as a physicist). In physics quantum means discrete, it does not mean small. Hence the idiom "quantum leap" used as "a discontinuous abrupt jump in quality" is perfectly in sync with the way physicists use the phrase.

Re: A Quantum Leap for the Web

#29

This sounds to me like Mozilla is getting impatient with Servo. Servo was more than just a parallel browser engine it was the only new web engine not based off of decade old codebase. It was a statement that it's feasible to hold off on monoculture because compatibility isn't impossible to achieve on new engines.

> This sounds to me like Mozilla is getting impatient with Servo.

I mean, yes. In a way. I think this was always part of the plan for Servo -- if things go well start uplifting ideas and/or code to Firefox. This isn't exactly impatience; it makes perfect sense to do this.

This isn't a change in gear for Servo, though. Servo is still chugging along. There are still no concrete plans (that I know of) for a Servo product, however Servo is working on stuff that it needs for it to be a product (i.e. it's not just focused on trying out researchy ideas to be used by Gecko), like proper SSL security. So there's nothing stopping Servo from being a product in the future, and Quantum doesn't affect this.

Quantum affects Servo in a couple of ways:

- There are now paid Gecko engineers hacking on bits of Servo (yay!). On the flipside, paid Servo engineers (e.g. me) are working on Quantum, but for the most part this involves improving Servo itself.

- Rough edges are being polished, web compatibility is being addressed for the quantum components. These were things that were always being worked on, but weren't always a priority for a given component. For example, there have always been optimizations that we knew we could do, but we hadn't done them so far since there were other researchy things to focus on. Now these are getting implemented.

- The build/CI system will probably have major changes to make it possible to smoothly integrate with Gecko. This doesn't really affect goals, just the day-to-day servo developer experience.

It doesn't affect Servo's goals or de-emphasize Servo itself. It just gets some of the advances that Servo has made to the public faster.

Re: A Quantum Leap for the Web

#30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think performance of the style systems in Blink and Firefox are similar. Since Servo's style system is linearly scalable, we expect most users to get a ~4x speed improvement on styling. Users's don't care specifically about style performance, though, but about things like interactivity. We think Servo's style system will improve those things, but don't have numbers for that on hand. To give a concrete example, it t…

How does WebKit's JITing style system compare? (As far as I'm aware, nobody else has anything like it, though it is still single-threaded as far as I'm aware.)

I would eventually like to look into a CSS JIT. But I would not like to just copy WebKit—I would like to look into treating CSS as a global DFA and compiling accordingly instead of looking at local optimizations only.

As always, the problem with JITs, especially on the Web, that it's hard to beat the interpreter when you take compilation time into account, and most selectors you see in the wild only apply to a small number of nodes.

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