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Servo announces grant from the NLnet Foundation

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Re: Servo announces grant from the NLnet Foundation

#81

Post by tristan957 »

whytevuhuni wrote: post #77
tristan957 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain why people shouldn't pursue passion projects because they are written in a language you don't like?

Not the parent, but my own opinion is that if a C/C++ passion project becomes successful, it burdens other people with yet another source of security vulnerabilities. This is even more so for small projects that didn't have the decades of security hardening of Firefox/Chrome behind them, and now people go to these projects assuming their security is on par with Firefox/Chrome.

Why is your imaginary burden more important than someone's passion?

I find Rust people to be really annoying these days if you can't even write software in the language you want to write without being a burden to society.

Re: Servo announces grant from the NLnet Foundation

#82

Post by wredue »

frankjr wrote: post #71
jedisct1 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not even memory safe. It has many "unsafe" and "transmut", and this is without the bazillion external dependencies it also depends on.

I mean they currently have 12 unsafes and 4 transmutes (who knows how many in dependencies). I wouldn't say it's many when the code base is clocking at around 53k of Rust. Compared to languages such as C/C++/Zig, which provide no safety at all, it's still an improvement to at least know where to look when address sanitizer is screaming at you (see the bug I linked to in the sibling comment).

Both zig and modern C++ have safety that is generally good and catches swathes of issues.

I’ve been writing zig for a couple months now and have only once accidentally leaked in a test, and haven’t once accidentally messed up a buffer.

Not saying you can’t, because zig definitely has escape hatches, but idiomatic zig has proven quite easy to stay safe without even thinking about it.

No. Neither is as pedantic as rust, but zig has been a joy to work in compared to either C++ or Rust in my opinion.

Re: Servo announces grant from the NLnet Foundation

#83

Post by andybak »

kodablah wrote: post #60
dale_glass wrote: post #3

I'm very excited about Servo. Can't believe Mozilla wasn't interested in it. Not only the idea of an engine with great security and performance is an excellent one, but I also love the idea of a web engine as a component. This for some reason seems to have disappeared in modern times. IE used to have an ActiveX control back in the Windows 9x days. You could embed a web engine anywhere you wanted. KHTML also worked li…

> I also love the idea of a web engine as a component. This for some reason seems to have disappeared in modern times. I have used CEF, WebKit, and WebView2. Only the former is easily embeddable cross platform, and as soon as it became popular, Google put a lot of resources into disallowing Google login from it or any other embedded browser[0]. I had to abandon my own CEF-based browser because of this. While I abhor…

There's a difference between a browser and an embedded webview. The latter shouldn't be logging into anything important at it's ripe for abuse - and basically training people to be phished by any app they install.

I admit the two categories are hazy, but it's an important distinction.

Re: Servo announces grant from the NLnet Foundation

#84

Post by seba_dos1 »

larodi wrote: post #55
dale_glass wrote: post #3

I'm very excited about Servo. Can't believe Mozilla wasn't interested in it. Not only the idea of an engine with great security and performance is an excellent one, but I also love the idea of a web engine as a component. This for some reason seems to have disappeared in modern times. IE used to have an ActiveX control back in the Windows 9x days. You could embed a web engine anywhere you wanted. KHTML also worked li…

It seems I'm utterly and entirely misled to believe that Servo is the engine behind Mozilla since... FF52 (it was, right)? Can some please explain what is it that Mozilla uses then to render pages, and which parts did Mozilla rewrite in FF? Did some parts of Servo made it into FF, and is FF contributing back to Servo? sorry, too many questions perhaps.

Firefox uses and has always used Gecko as its engine. Some parts that originated from Servo got transplanted into Firefox over the last few years, but overall it's still Gecko.

Re: Servo announces grant from the NLnet Foundation

#86

Post by maleldil »

unflxw wrote: post #49
maleldil wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Stop using Firefox? And use what? A Chromium reskin and give up the web to Google? Mozilla has (many) problems, but it remains the main organisation fighting for the open web.

I'd argue that the EFF is the main organization fighting for the open web.

The EFF is great and important too, but I feel like developing a competitive browser has more direct impact.

Re: Servo announces grant from the NLnet Foundation

#87

Post by frankjr »

wredue wrote: post #82
frankjr wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean they currently have 12 unsafes and 4 transmutes (who knows how many in dependencies). I wouldn't say it's many when the code base is clocking at around 53k of Rust. Compared to languages such as C/C++/Zig, which provide no safety at all, it's still an improvement to at least know where to look when address sanitizer is screaming at you (see the bug I linked to in the sibling comment).

Both zig and modern C++ have safety that is generally good and catches swathes of issues. I’ve been writing zig for a couple months now and have only once accidentally leaked in a test, and haven’t once accidentally messed up a buffer. Not saying you can’t, because zig definitely has escape hatches, but idiomatic zig has proven quite easy to stay safe without even thinking about it. No. Neither is as pedantic as rust…

I agree that there's a lot to like about Zig (the module system and error management are the two I mainly consider superior to Rust's approach for example) but I wouldn't say it's easy to stay safe without thinking about it. Quite the contrary actually.

Rust sometimes forces you to add annotations which certainly can get unwieldy at times (I think this in particular trips a lot people because sometimes they know what they want to tell the compiler but don't know how to express it in Rust speak and thus anger ensues). Zig, on the other hand, doesn't require any of that and makes code look simple and arguably more pleasant in comparison, but it doesn't mean the "contract" between objects goes away. It's just not expressed in code and checked by the compiler but rather by the person writing the code.

Take [0] for example. The compiler (at least in the current stage, it's at 0.11 after all) is perfectly happy with code which returns a pointer to a stack allocated memory from a function. The fix is to remember that you need to pass the argument via pointer and not let the compiler decide for you. But what if the programmer forgets or somebody else is working on the code?

[0] https://github.com/ziglang/zig/pull/17419

Re: Servo announces grant from the NLnet Foundation

#88

Post by slikrick »

wredue wrote: post #76
frankjr wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you talking about this? Interesting read and caused by one of the unsafe+transmute the sibling comment is talking about. https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/pull/7227

It was recent. I just updated to Sonoma and then after recompiling everything, helix was crashing whenever I switched modes due to reading past the buffer. Sorry I can’t be any more help on specifics than that. I am WAY beyond fiddling with my tools when they give me trouble. I just moved back to neovim.

if you don't have time to look into it then you shouldn't just blindly spout incorrect information, just saying.

Re: Servo announces grant from the NLnet Foundation

#89

Post by _wf2l »

jedisct1 wrote: post #30
sergiotapia wrote: post #20

See also Ladybird for another from-scratch browser being built by a more ragtag indie group. https://ladybird.dev/ The chaddest of the chad projects honestly.

I have more hope in Ladybird than Servo, TBH. Considering how young it is, Ladybird is already very impressive. Even just to take screenshots, Servo's renderer is very basic, slow and buggy.

I don't see Ladybird ever being seriously useful. Already serious browser projects like Brave, Arc, and Orion struggle to keep me off of Firefox.

Servo is honestly doing the correct thing by focusing on embed-ability into other projects, something that has been basically dominated by Chrome alone

Re: Servo announces grant from the NLnet Foundation

#90

Post by unflxw »

maleldil wrote: post #86
unflxw wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue that the EFF is the main organization fighting for the open web.

The EFF is great and important too, but I feel like developing a competitive browser has more direct impact.

I agree, but that's a very generous description of what Mozilla is doing. I'd say they're less "developing a competitive browser" and more "keeping an uncompetitive browser on life support to continue to profit off it".
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