I don't understand what the difference is between Quantum and Servo. To me it sounds like a new name for the same thing. I recall Servo being promoted this way three years ago.
A Quantum Leap for the Web
51–60 of 141 posts
Re: A Quantum Leap for the Web
#52Pet peeve of mine: a "quantum leap" is literally the smallest change of state that is physically possible , but it's come to mean the opposite in popular use.
It's a barrier that can't be smoothly crossed, so it implies revolution over evolution.
I think you're accidentally mixing in some Planck with your quantum.
Re: A Quantum Leap for the Web
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Speaking for myself, I don't want "Servo components" in Firefox; I want Servo in Firefox. I want an engine as fast as the one they have shown of Servo as being; not pieces of it that make Firefox incrementally better; I want a browser that is miles ahead. That's always what I found interesting about Servo.
At the same time, you want a browser that keep working with the web at least on the same level as Firefox is right now. Servo is getting us 80% there, the remaining 20% of quirks, non-standardized behavior and web sites coded with only Chrome/Fx/IE in mind are going to be increasingly difficult to cover. On the other hand some pieces of servo are close to have "full" compatibility. That means that we can put them in…
Incremental improvements are fine, but they don't need a codename or a blog post. Incremental improvements are just something you always do in software development.
Re: A Quantum Leap for the Web
#54Pet peeve of mine: a "quantum leap" is literally the smallest change of state that is physically possible , but it's come to mean the opposite in popular use.
Time to shelve that pet peeve, because any physicist should be able to tell you that this claim is one of those hilarious "people keep pretending this is true" when it has nothing to do with what a quantum leap actually is.
In physics, a "quantum leap" is a synonym for atomic electron state changes. These don't take place as a continuous gradient change, they jump from one state to the next, releasing or absorbing photons as they do so: the changes are quantized, and any change from one state to another termed a quantum leap. And it really is "any change": they're all quantum leaps.
There is also no stipulation on direction, state changes go both up and down. So while there certainly is a lower bound to the value that we will find in the set of all possible quantum leaps in atomic physics (because you can't go "half distances", the whole point of quanta is that it's all or nothing). the idea that a quantum leap is "one value" is patent nonsense; different state transitions have different values, and can be anywhere between tiny and huge jumps, and can release massively energetic photons in the process.
And if the term has been given a new meaning in everyday common language, then cool. That's how language works. It doesn't need to be correct with respect to its origin, people just need to all agree on what the terms used mean. In every day language, understanding that "a quantum leap" means "a fundamental change in how we do things" (which is implied always a big deal, even if the change itself is small) demonstrates a basic understanding of conversational English. So that's cool too.
Re: A Quantum Leap for the Web
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Project Quantum is an opportunity to ship some of the Servo components in Firefox and gain millions of users, real-world tests of the technology, and hopefully dramatically expand our contributor base. As we mention in a post to the Servo mailing list ( https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.servo/3b... ), Servo has a lot coming in 2017 unrelated to Project Quantum or Firefox.
Speaking for myself, I don't want "Servo components" in Firefox; I want Servo in Firefox. I want an engine as fast as the one they have shown of Servo as being; not pieces of it that make Firefox incrementally better; I want a browser that is miles ahead. That's always what I found interesting about Servo.
Even if you don't care about Gecko, this benefits Servo. It lets us battle-harden core components like WebRender and the style system.
Re: A Quantum Leap for the Web
#56Pet peeve of mine: a "quantum leap" is literally the smallest change of state that is physically possible , but it's come to mean the opposite in popular use.
Time to shelve that pet peeve, because any physicist should be able to tell you that this claim is one of those hilarious "people keep pretending this is true" when it has nothing to do with what a quantum leap actually is. In physics, a "quantum leap" is a synonym for atomic electron state changes. These don't take place as a continuous gradient change, they jump from one state to the next, releasing or absorbing ph…
In physics, a "quantum leap" is a synonym for atomic electron state changes.
Right. The smallest such change physically possible, which is exactly what I said.
Re: A Quantum Leap for the Web
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Time to shelve that pet peeve, because any physicist should be able to tell you that this claim is one of those hilarious "people keep pretending this is true" when it has nothing to do with what a quantum leap actually is. In physics, a "quantum leap" is a synonym for atomic electron state changes. These don't take place as a continuous gradient change, they jump from one state to the next, releasing or absorbing ph…
In physics, a "quantum leap" is a synonym for atomic electron state changes. Right. The smallest such change physically possible, which is exactly what I said.
Again with the pretending there is only one possible change here: a state change in high orbit excitation levels is nowhere near "the smallest such changes", yet we still call them quantum leaps because that's what they are. The distances and energies involved are HUGE at the atomic scale, which is the scale we must necessarily stay grounded in when discussing what a quantum leap "really" means. (where "really" is a misnomer because there is nothing that requires a scientifically precise term to be reflected in common everyday language. The only important part is that you don't use the meaning of the latter in the context of the first)
Re: A Quantum Leap for the Web
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
At the same time, you want a browser that keep working with the web at least on the same level as Firefox is right now. Servo is getting us 80% there, the remaining 20% of quirks, non-standardized behavior and web sites coded with only Chrome/Fx/IE in mind are going to be increasingly difficult to cover. On the other hand some pieces of servo are close to have "full" compatibility. That means that we can put them in…
Incremental improvements are fine, but they don't need a codename or a blog post. Incremental improvements are just something you always do in software development.
Incremental improvements that together amount to a significant rearchitecture are not the same as incremental improvements that are just fiddling around the edges.
But even the latter may need a name if they will involve months of time and a large enough group of people that all need to be able to refer to them. Blog posts are more debatable, of course.
Re: A Quantum Leap for the Web
#59I don't understand what the difference is between Quantum and Servo. To me it sounds like a new name for the same thing. I recall Servo being promoted this way three years ago.
Servo is a project to build a new rendering engine in Rust, taking advantage of its security properties and ease of doing parallelism to do things that other rendering engines are not willing or are not able to do in terms of parallel execution.
Quantum is a project to significantly change some of the core parts of Gecko. Some of this will involve sharing some code with Servo, some will involve changing the Gecko code directly.
There is overlap between the two in the form of some shared components, which may be causing your confusion.
Re: A Quantum Leap for the Web
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not saying it means small, just that quantum leaps are nanoscale. And also, the state after the leap isn't better or worse than the state before, just different.
I still disagree. Quantum does not imply nanoscale - we are building bigger and bigger systems that exhibit inherently quantum behavior (for instance superconducting cavities used in quantum computing research are centimeter scale). Moreover, the jump is not necessarily in a spatial variable - it can be a very big jump in energy levels for instance, which is the case with laser emissions. Sure, a (big or small) discr…
I stand corrected. Thank you.