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Servo’s new home

blog.servo.org

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Re: Servo’s new home

#291

Post by ezekiel68 »

For all I know, Servo will go on to conquer the world.

However -- after surveying the comments here, I am left with a poignant sense that this launchpad project has already contributed way beyond its share of heavy lifting to shape and to popularize the rust programming language. Servo no longer needs to succeed in order for rust to win.

Back before multi-core x86 CPUs or the C10K paper came out, a unique engineer decided to show the world[0] how an event-driven web server could perform way better than the threaded web servers of the day. Nobody really uses thttpd in serious production work anymore, but its influence and example can be traced through Zeus web server, lighttpd, litespeed, and on to haproxy and nginx today.

[0] http://acme.com/software/thttpd/

Re: Servo’s new home

#292

Post by eitland »

ygjb wrote: post #234
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see any irony there; people care about firefox, and there is literally no way to donate money to develop firefox. Maybe donating to the foundation sorta indirectly helps firefox, but a reasonable person could easily view them as mostly unrelated.

Sure, you can donate money to develop Firefox, but it's not a core part of Mozilla's business model to support that. Instead you would need to track down an OSS developer that is either an active contributor, or who is willing to work on Firefox, and then sponsor their work through a number of different contributor pathways. There are Github sponsorships, direct funding, or any of the options here - https://itsfoss.c…

> Sure, you can donate money to develop Firefox,

My understanding:

I'm fairly sure they've said they are not allowed to direct money from the Foundation to Mozilla Corporation, and it kind of makes sense until you realize it is the coroporation that creates the outcome you want not the other way around.

Also - from my point of view it looks like the Foundation is overfunded the last few years while the guys who create Firefox are underfunded, but I'm not an expert so it might very well be more complicated.

I also don't want to say Mozillas management are useless: they somehow managed to land a huge deal earlier this year, but I will admit I sometimes find some of their decisions puzzling.

Re: Servo’s new home

#293

Post by jhoechtl »

trevyn wrote: post #272
jhoechtl wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should there be any great difference? Firefox is already written in a language where compilers have been optimized since decades. Rust will not bring that magic.

Rust makes it much easier to do complex performance optimizations safely, particularly those involving concurrency. The canonical example is the multi-threading of Servo’s CSS processor. It’s not an automatic magic bullet, but in a world where humans are still writing the code, Rust’s feature set makes many performance optimizations much more practical.

When did Firefox last crash on you? Aren't we optimzing on a problem which is practically non-existing?

Re: Servo’s new home

#294

Post by dmitryminkovsky »

eitland wrote: post #118
dmitryminkovsky wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not in a position to donate right now, so thanks a lot for donating to this project. Though I do wonder how much influence Servo will have on preventing browser monoculture given that as a stand-alone thing it can’t be or isn’t involved in developing standards. Mozilla will still have to play that role. I hope they step up to the plate and stay focused on this most important thing.

> I’m not in a position to donate right now, so thanks a lot for donating to this project. I've been there myself for years. I'm happy to now be in a position not even have to think to donate tonight. Hopefully you too will get there soon too! Edit: and thanks for your contributions to netty and graphql-java!

Thanks a lot! Hope I will too :).

Re: Servo’s new home

#295

Post by Frondo »

dang wrote: post #231
andrewmcwatters wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I welcome you to go read the rest of my posts in this thread and get back to me on whether or not my posts are substantive, thanks!

I didn't mean that all of your posts were that way, only some of them. Can I try my luck at persuading you a little? The reason we moderate like this is not because of morality or taste. It's because of the dynamics of a community of HN's size. The goal is simply to have a community that doesn't suck. That is in all our interests, including yours, as you're participating here. There are other internet communities, sm…

Holy shit, Dan! I just gained so much respect for you as a moderator (and therefore participant) in this community.

Taking the time to write out this very thoughtful, insightful reply to someone who may be knowledgeable but was throwing out hostile one-liners, that is impressive and gives such a great deal of credibility to the work you're doing here -- work that largely goes unseen, of course.

Amazing.

(I actually put down the piece of food I was eating, mid-bite, to write this out. You made my day!)

Re: Servo’s new home

#296

Post by cmrdporcupine »

stuaxo wrote: post #141
coldtea wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is some cost/effort to building a better browser engine. They might believe that the same cost/effort would better benefit the business if put elsewhere. Yes, because all those years the Mozilla executive team has proved that they have a good grasp of where the cost/effort optimum lies... /s

From the outside it seems like eating the seeds for next years harvest.

I can't speak for how things were at Mozilla, I have no idea. But separate teams working on "rewrites" of platforms that other teams have to maintain often leads to a demoralized environment, pointless duplicated work, and elongated schedules and failure to deliver on milestones.

I've seen it several times: Often after years of promises from "the new hot" team, with them cannibalizing resources and top talent but missing milestones and still having failed to deliver, the new beast is cancelled and the value of the "old" system is suddenly recognized.

There's the classic Spolsky essay about this: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

What's better? Refactor the old thing as you go. Include the "legacy" team in the development team of the new thing. Even more so, make the "new" team work on the old thing as well. Rotate developers between the two, build a culture of respect.

Not saying that is what happened at Moz, but I've seen it play out so many times. And without a concrete commitment to be forced to deliver to actual customers projects like these can just go forever noodling around in perfection-land.

Re: Servo’s new home

#297

Post by bildung »

shi314 wrote: post #187
coldpie wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The absolute number doesn't matter. Non-profits participate in the same labor market as for-profit companies. You have to compare it to executive salaries for other similarly sized companies in their market segment to make the argument that she is overpaid. Otherwise you're just arguing against income inequality, which is not a problem exclusive to Mozilla, and crippling Mozilla's ability to participate in that labor…

Does Mozilla compete with for profit companies for C suite market? Which technology intensive company hire a CEO who is lawyer by profession and hasn't had any redeeming resume for management and technology. If you look at firefox's market share, the only growth it had was when she was not a CEO. Seriously, Mozilla is not competing with for profit companies in C suite labor market.

Does Mozilla compete with for profit companies for C suite market?

Yes, Baker is CEO of the for profit corporation.

Which technology intensive company hire a CEO who is lawyer by profession and hasn't had any redeeming resume for management and technology.

Are you aware that she cofounded the project in the 90s? Mozilla (corporation) didn't just decide to hire a lawyer out of the blue in 2018.

Re: Servo’s new home

#298

Post by dralley »

pabs3 wrote: post #269
dralley wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LGPL doesn't work for languages that don't have good support for dynamic linking. Static linking is mostly incompatible with the LGPL. That makes it unusable for Rust, Go, and some C++ libraries. Wheras with MPLv2 the contract is basically "if you make a change to any of the source code files derived from the original work, those changes have to remain under MPLv2". But linking that code from non-copyleft code is OK,…

The LGPL definitely allows static linking, you just have to make it feasible for the user to modify the open source parts of the library and relink them into your proprietary application.

Which is a pain for most non-C languages. And it still doesn't work with templates.

Re: Servo’s new home

#299

Post by pjmlp »

nvrspyx wrote: post #87
simias wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the plan exactly? Will there be a Servo browser that integrates the servo rendering engine with some open source components (for instance from Firefox, WebKit or Chromium) that will let us use the engine stand-alone, or is it "just" going to be an engine for embedding in third-party programs? The former seems like it would be a huge amount of work, but if it's the latter I fear for the long term survival of th…

A third-option that I would like to see is extending the latter to an Electron alternative (aka using Servo as a cross-platform GUI). There's definitely positives to Electron, but it would be nice to see a more performant, less memory hungry, and more battery friendly alternative.

The alternative exists since 20 years now, run a background daemon with local browser, or ping back in the platform WebWidgets.

Re: Servo’s new home

#300

Post by pjmlp »

The_rationalist wrote: post #218
fabrice_d wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at the corporate sponsors (that include Samsung and Huawei) - they may provide paid contributors.

I strongly believe that you could get funded by Google if you attempted to port stylo to chromium. Firefox still has state of the art css performance I believe, thanks to stylo.

First the Chrome team needs to be convinced to use Rust.

They have done some exploratory work, but nothing that shows they would actually do it.

They are most likely to just double down on the ongoing C++ lifetimes support on LLVM than switch languages.

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