Live data from Hacker News

Transitioning Firefox's rendering engine from Gecko to Servo

jensimmons.com

101–110 of 219 posts

Re: Transitioning Firefox's rendering engine from Gecko to Servo

#101

I didn't look at the name of the writer when I started reading it but by the way the article is written I was suspecting it was written by a woman. Stupid analogies and fluff, lots of commas... What a loss of time...

She tried a conversational writing style and failed.

Seems that you can't even combine 'she' and 'failed' in one sentence here on HN. Looking for alternatives, since the issue still persists.

Re: Transitioning Firefox's rendering engine from Gecko to Servo

#102

What do folks think of internetisms that the author uses like "Because Mor Better Ideas™."? I see a number of engineers use broken phrasing like that in posts and presentations and it comes off really badly to others not in on the "joke". Does anyone really find that sort of thing actually funny or additive or is it the equivalent of trite office humor gone online?

It's annoying and unprofessional. Stop trying to be cutesy and present the information in a way that people who are busy can consume quickly and make decisions on. Is this the tone of the whole project? I'd love to contribute, but I don't want to wade through a reddit-comment-thread-level of forced references and memes to do that. I get the reason for doing it, and I like that the internet isn't full of drab corporat…

>It's annoying and unprofessional. Stop trying to be cutesy and present the information in a way that people who are busy can consume quickly and make decisions on.

The world in general, and personal blogs in particular, doesn't exist to serve people who are "busy".

And being flippant on one's blog has nothing to do with being "unprofessional".

In fact, the blog where TFA is from is not a business or professional endeavor to begin with. So "professionalism" (however some provincial people conceive it) is not a requirement for it.

Not to mention that billions are made in fully professional endeavors that actually include such references and humor (from Google's easter eggs to funny messages in update notes in various apps, etc).

Re: Transitioning Firefox's rendering engine from Gecko to Servo

#103
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, you can write individual components in Rust and put them into Servo and then refactor the existing C++ to make it modular enough for those components to be replaced by the Rust version. Then eventually you'll be able to replace enough components that it's all Servo, and no Gecko. At that point Servo will be functionally complete, as its individual components will be on par with the Gecko components.

I think it's unclear whether everything will get replaced by Rust components from Servo: certainly, smaller components are likely to get replaced, but larger interwoven parts are obviously going to be far harder to replace. I suspect not all of the Rust code that replaces the old C++ code will be from Servo: some will be written specifically for Gecko.

Firefox has already committed to eliminating XUL components. Once it has the correct APIs to emulate existing add-ons, mobile Firefox could probably switch over to Servo. Desktop has a lot more cruft and features, so it will probably be harder to switch.

But I wouldn't be surprised if Servo is usable on mobile in 2017.

Re: Transitioning Firefox's rendering engine from Gecko to Servo

#104
post #8

The submission title has been changed from "Replacing the Jet Engine While Still Flying" to "Mozilla’s project to replace Gecko with Servo" (at the time of this writing). Some of the other comments are pertaining to the "Jet Engine" title. For anybody that might be confused, like I was :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7XW-mewUm8

Re: Transitioning Firefox's rendering engine from Gecko to Servo

#105
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately the new title seems to be misleading in a different way. There is no "project to replace gecko with servo". There is a project to advance gecko so it is state of the art in browser engines. Much of the current state of the art has been developed in Servo, and the natural way to bring that technology to gecko is to integrate the components from servo directly. This has other nice properties like increasi…

To put servo into production and let it face attackers would be a profuse test for the viability of the memory safety claims.

Rust is already used in stable Firefox. https://hacks.mozilla.org/2016/07/shipping-rust-in-firefox/

Re: Transitioning Firefox's rendering engine from Gecko to Servo

#106
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She tried a conversational writing style and failed.

Seems that you can't even combine 'she' and 'failed' in one sentence here on HN. Looking for alternatives, since the issue still persists.

Your parent comment is nearly void of substance and dismissive. It's okay to have a criticism of the the writing style, but without some additional information about why (e.g., examples, comparisons with similar styles of writing), it adds little constructive to the conversation. That in and of itself can draw downvotes.

Re: Transitioning Firefox's rendering engine from Gecko to Servo

#107
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I enjoy reading words which indicate the person who wrote them is not entirely dead inside. It provides, i feel, for a Mor Better Reading Experience™

I'll be dead on the outside eventually as Grim Death's grasping claw squeezes the life out of me. Please, my time on earth is precious and I would rather spend it with my loved ones in preference to skimming over forced references.

Oh yeah, that 0.5s you lost while reading that totally ruined your day, enough to make you waste even more time to comment on it.

It's an informal blog, I read the same reference, thought, "must be some joke I've missed", and got on with reading the rest of the blog.

Re: Transitioning Firefox's rendering engine from Gecko to Servo

#108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not going to change that. No matter how efficient you make the JS engine, crappy JS will still steal all your ressouces.

Yes. However, a crappy, leaky, JS engine running crappy JS code will steal all resources even quicker. I hope a JS engine built with Rust smart ptrs will be less leaky than one built in C/C++. In my experience, hand rolled memory pooling systems can be very leaky.

We have extensive leak checking in our testing for Firefox, so hopefully the JS engine is not "very leaky".

One part of Quantum, which does not have anything to do with Rust, is to figure out how we can spend less time running unimportant JS (like maybe in a background tab), which will hopefully reduce CPU usage.

Re: Transitioning Firefox's rendering engine from Gecko to Servo

#109
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If performance is not competitive, it will not be much of a success story, but it will be more interesting to see how much better it will be in terms of security issues.

It was better 2 years ago (with caveats) - https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTgzNDA But there's definitely place for speed gains due to multithreading.

After years of the multicore hype, we finally can reap its benefits.
Post reply on HN