Sorry but posting this on medium is a quantum leap backwards. That too from Mozilla.
A Quantum Leap for the Web
71–80 of 141 posts
Re: A Quantum Leap for the Web
#72[disclaimer: I co-founded Mozilla Research, which sponsors Servo] It's awesome to see the Gecko team continue to tackle big, ambitious projects now that electrolysis is rolling out. And I'm so excited that they're betting big on Servo and Rust. Servo has really been taking advantage of one of Rust's promises: that you can reach for more aggressive parallelism and actually maintain it. I believe recent numbers showed…
> The more we fully utilize those cores, the smoother we should be able to make the whole web.
I wonder why the GC/CC are not multithreaded though. It seems like those are fairly isolated components, considering the entire application gets suspended so they can do their job, i.e. prime candidates for parallelism.
When forcing a collection on a large firefox instance it can easily spend 20+ seconds collecting on a single thread while a java VM can munch churn through something like 1 gigabyte per second per core.
In other words, from the outside it looks like a low-hanging fruit that has not been plucked.
Re: A Quantum Leap for the Web
#73This 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.
Compatibility in new engines is ... hard. Servo is basically going to need to spoof the WebKit UA and duplicate a bunch of WebKit bugs (the Edge approach) or spoof the Gecko UA and duplicate a bunch of Gecko bugs. Some specs now have an explicit "does your UA say you are Gecko, or does it say you are WebKit" switch with behavior specified for both branches. :(
Considering that Servo is an embeddable engine, why not keep the scope of Servo focused in building a standards-compliant engine?
Replicating other engine's bugs sounds like too much effort towards the wrong direction :/
Although, after the -webkit-disaster I don't really expect anyone to like the idea of a standards-compliant engine :(
Re: A Quantum Leap for the Web
#74Doesn't Chrome/Chromium already run as multiple processes?
Re: A Quantum Leap for the Web
#75Doesn't Chrome/Chromium already run as multiple processes?
I believe it is "only" one process per tab on Chrome. This sounds like having multiple processes per tab (or at least, active tab), splitting up different kinds of work to "specialist" processes.
Clarification / refinement, anybody?
Re: A Quantum Leap for the Web
#76[disclaimer: I co-founded Mozilla Research, which sponsors Servo] It's awesome to see the Gecko team continue to tackle big, ambitious projects now that electrolysis is rolling out. And I'm so excited that they're betting big on Servo and Rust. Servo has really been taking advantage of one of Rust's promises: that you can reach for more aggressive parallelism and actually maintain it. I believe recent numbers showed…
> The more we fully utilize those cores, the smoother we should be able to make the whole web. I wonder why the GC/CC are not multithreaded though. It seems like those are fairly isolated components, considering the entire application gets suspended so they can do their job, i.e. prime candidates for parallelism. When forcing a collection on a large firefox instance it can easily spend 20+ seconds collecting on a sin…
That would be hard to do without writing a new javascript engine, which would expand Servo's current scope pretty dramatically. My guess would be that as long as there are big gains to be made that can be done without rewriting SpiderMonkey, the servo project would rather only tackle one massive project at a time :)
Re: A Quantum Leap for the Web
#77Earlier 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.
There's a giant gap between your personal lack of interest and the notion that this blog post is something no one finds interesting.
Re: A Quantum Leap for the Web
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
There's a giant gap between your personal lack of interest and the notion that this blog post is something no one finds interesting.
> Speaking for myself
Re: A Quantum Leap for the Web
#79Doesn't Chrome/Chromium already run as multiple processes?
I believe it is "only" one process per tab on Chrome. This sounds like having multiple processes per tab (or at least, active tab), splitting up different kinds of work to "specialist" processes. Clarification / refinement, anybody?
There is this concept called "threads" which can be found in most operating systems.
Re: A Quantum Leap for the Web
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a giant gap between your personal lack of interest and the notion that this blog post is something no one finds interesting.
> Speaking for myself
Perhaps in some comment to which I did not reply. The parent I am attached to had no such disclaimer but did explicitly say this is not worth a blog post.