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Inside a fast CSS engine

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Re: Inside a fast CSS engine

#81

Post by demarq »

taeric wrote: post #64
rhencke wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the job of your operating system's scheduler - to divide the limited resource of your computer's CPU time among different competing tasks. In the modern era, a program cannot take more than its fair share of CPU time - otherwise, a runaway program could easily render your computer nearly unusable. (Linux, macOS and Windows all use preemptive multitasking.) The way to tell your operating system what you desire…

I'm well aware of that. I also know that, in general, having to schedule things slows them down. If everything I'm running is trying to schedule something on my entire machine, it is giving my OS more work. Which will, by necessity, be harder to schedule and slow things down. I'm not necessarily against all of this, but I'm also not eagerly embracing more crap to slow down my machine for no apparent reason.

You are assuming that your OS scheduler is nearly at capacity, it isn't. And moreover your CPU is will spend most of it's life idle.

I could almost guarantee you this is not the bottleneck of any modern setup.

Re: Inside a fast CSS engine

#82

Post by emiliocobos »

pcwalton wrote: post #80
om2 wrote: post #79

I wish this post included some benchmarks or measurement.

Just asked Emilio on IRC for some quick numbers. emilio: pcwalton: wrt gecko we have stuff like https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1342220#c25 and similar emilio: pcwalton: there's also the tp6 numbers, though those also measure CSS parsing and other stuff that isn't the style engine per se pcwalton: emilio: our tp6 numbers are improved over Gecko at this point, yes? :) emilio: pcwalton: amazon by a huge am…

(for more context, Facebook has a very small style recalc time, so we're bottlenecked right now on the time it takes for us to parse CSS, and build the data structures for selector-matching and invalidation, and the patches on the queue are https://github.com/servo/servo/pull/18191)

Re: Inside a fast CSS engine

#83

Post by cpeterso »

robin_reala wrote: post #65
kristofferR wrote: post #58

It's such a shame Firefox (including the nightlies) kills my Mac (making most other applications hang/break), since the new versions are otherwise way better than Chrome. Does anyone know what it is about Firefox that makes the rest of my system unable to spawn new processes?

That’s weird. If you’re not attached to your profile you could try resetting it (go to about:support) and see if that fixes it. Otherwise I’d file a bug.

"Refreshing" your Firefox profile from about:support is not as scary as it sounds. :) It creates a clean profile and imports your old profile's bookmarks, passwords, and browsing history. You just lose any settings tweaks and old add-ons you had. Your old profile directory is also backed up in case something goes wrong during the new profile import.

Re: Inside a fast CSS engine

#84

Post by crescentfresh »

I always wonder, who puts together nifty little blog posts on this kind of thing complete with graphics just for the article? By that I mean, literally what title do they have?

Myself and my colleagues would/could write up a technical breakdown of something neat or innovative we might have done to solve some problem at work, but we sure as shit can't make cool little graphics interspersed between opportune paragraphs, nor could we figure out how to make the thing entertaining to read.

Is this kind of thing done in coordination with like a PR/graphics department?

Re: Inside a fast CSS engine

#85

Post by 0xCMP »

crescentfresh wrote: post #84

I always wonder, who puts together nifty little blog posts on this kind of thing complete with graphics just for the article? By that I mean, literally what title do they have? Myself and my colleagues would/could write up a technical breakdown of something neat or innovative we might have done to solve some problem at work, but we sure as shit can't make cool little graphics interspersed between opportune paragraphs…

Technical writers often do this. At an agency I worked at my co-worker worked that job + being a freelance technical writer and she used to make graphics all the time for documentation and articles.

Re: Inside a fast CSS engine

#86

Post by LoSboccacc »

crescentfresh wrote: post #84

I always wonder, who puts together nifty little blog posts on this kind of thing complete with graphics just for the article? By that I mean, literally what title do they have? Myself and my colleagues would/could write up a technical breakdown of something neat or innovative we might have done to solve some problem at work, but we sure as shit can't make cool little graphics interspersed between opportune paragraphs…

Marketing depth has a budget usually and can hire external graphic talent as needed. Not saying that this was the case eh, speaking generally.

Re: Inside a fast CSS engine

#87

Post by tedunangst »

crescentfresh wrote: post #84

I always wonder, who puts together nifty little blog posts on this kind of thing complete with graphics just for the article? By that I mean, literally what title do they have? Myself and my colleagues would/could write up a technical breakdown of something neat or innovative we might have done to solve some problem at work, but we sure as shit can't make cool little graphics interspersed between opportune paragraphs…

> Lin is an engineer on the Mozilla Developer Relations team. She tinkers with JavaScript, WebAssembly, Rust, and Servo, and also draws code cartoons.

Re: Inside a fast CSS engine

#88

Post by Swizec »

crescentfresh wrote: post #84

I always wonder, who puts together nifty little blog posts on this kind of thing complete with graphics just for the article? By that I mean, literally what title do they have? Myself and my colleagues would/could write up a technical breakdown of something neat or innovative we might have done to solve some problem at work, but we sure as shit can't make cool little graphics interspersed between opportune paragraphs…

Staff blogger perhaps?

I've been hired before by companies to take something their engineering team has done and turn it into a blogpost. I can't do graphics, but I can write a mean blogpost about pretty much anything you can think of.

Some posts/articles that came out of such initiatives have gone on to get published in dead-tree magazines or stick around the frontpage of HN for a few hours.

Broadly speaking, if you were doing this as a job job, I think it would fall under "developer evangelist". Your job is to make the company look good to potential hires and API consumers. Do whatever it takes. That involves going to conferences, writing blogposts, drawing graphics, and using freelancer resources to help you out in areas where you can't go. Usually evangelists can do most of the job on their own.

Re: Inside a fast CSS engine

#89

Post by pmlamotte »

crescentfresh wrote: post #84

I always wonder, who puts together nifty little blog posts on this kind of thing complete with graphics just for the article? By that I mean, literally what title do they have? Myself and my colleagues would/could write up a technical breakdown of something neat or innovative we might have done to solve some problem at work, but we sure as shit can't make cool little graphics interspersed between opportune paragraphs…

I believe she just has a talent for it, she's an engineer as far as I know and has other related cartoon descriptions: http://lin-clark.com/

Her talk on react fiber this year is quite good as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCuYPiUIONs

Re: Inside a fast CSS engine

#90

Post by [deleted] »

crescentfresh wrote: post #84

I always wonder, who puts together nifty little blog posts on this kind of thing complete with graphics just for the article? By that I mean, literally what title do they have? Myself and my colleagues would/could write up a technical breakdown of something neat or innovative we might have done to solve some problem at work, but we sure as shit can't make cool little graphics interspersed between opportune paragraphs…

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