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Servo Nightly Builds Available

blog.servo.org

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Re: Servo Nightly Builds Available

#141

Post by nickpsecurity »

Manishearth wrote: post #97
gsnedders wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By now, HTML and the standards surrounding it have become so big that starting from a blank slate nowadays is next to impossible. It's a two sided coin: HTML now defines a lot of the basic web platform parts in enough detail that you can just implement the spec and have a web browser that works , whereas in the 90s (and most of the 00s) browsers spent huge amounts of resources on reverse-engineering each other. Pre…

Well, we still do lots of reverse-engineering, because the specs are often wrong :)

It's a rule of thumb in most software I found studying high-assurance. Inevitably, some academic or commercial team wants to robustly implement some standard (esp a protocol). They notice it's specified in a combo of English and implementation code. They start doing formal specifications of English spec. Every time, IIRC, they find various inconsistencies and such that already did or could lead to real-world problems. Showed me the value of formal specs but also important lesson: using informal specs will almost always require reverse engineering and extensive testing due to, at very least, English ambiguity or implementation deviations.

Re: Servo Nightly Builds Available

#142

Post by larsberg »

gsnedders wrote: post #131
larsberg wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you can just implement the spec and have a web browser that works Don't forget the amazing work being done at http://testthewebforward.org/ with the Web Platform Tests and your own work on the CSSWG tests! Beyond the specs, having a cross-browser set of tests that have especially good coverage on newer specs has been a huge leg-up for Servo! It not only helps us ensure interop for those features that are tested, bu…

To be fair, having tests somewhat relies on having a spec. OK, so in theory we could've had a cross-browser set of tests with some requirement along the lines of "this web page relies on this behaviour", but ultimately you'd still end up with contradictory tests. :) I wonder if it's worthwhile to spend some time working on the 2.1 testsuite to try and improve coverage at some point. Probably? Unlikely to find so many…

I think it's worthwhile! Lack of a comprehensive test suite means:

1) There are seem to still be regressions in pretty fundamental stuff when new features are added. Usually caught before things reach "release" trains, but I see it in bug trackers all the time.

2) Other layout engine managers I've talked with who want to do a layout system rewrite are terrified of anything that doesn't look like a large-scale refactoring because of this issue. I've had the "how are you testing and measuring progress / how do you know you're done with layout?" conversation with most of our engine peers at this point :-)

Re: Servo Nightly Builds Available

#143

Post by metajack »

capnrefsmmat wrote: post #122
kibwen wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

browser.html is just the browser chrome (er, not to be confused with the browser Chrome), it's an independent Mozilla project to create a frontend entirely in web technologies, which, since these are all standardized, should theoretically work with any browser engine, not just Servo. As for Firefox, later on this year we should see the integration of Servo's style engine ("Stylo") into Gecko, and going forward we sho…

What exactly does "style engine" encompass? Just CSS parsing and style properties, or layout stuff, or something in between?

Parsing CSS, the selector matching to apply style rules to nodes, and the cascade of properties to other nodes.

Servo's style engine is parallelized and scales nearly linearly with number of cores, and style time is a non-trivial amount of the total rendering time.

Re: Servo Nightly Builds Available

#144

Post by metajack »

kibwen wrote: post #110
Manishearth wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> theoretically work with any browser engine, not just Servo. Well, it depends on some privileged APIs, of course. But we've tried to keep that API surface minimal.

Ah I wasn't aware of that, what do these priveliged APIs do?

The main one is mozbrowser which has some documentation here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Using_the_B...

We are deliberately trying to keep this to the bare minimum, and will likely try and find someway to standardize those few things we do if possible.

Re: Servo Nightly Builds Available

#145

Post by metajack »

iamcreasy wrote: post #48
pcwalton wrote: post #2

Happy to answer questions (when I wake up; getting this ready has been a lot of work, needless to say) :) It goes without saying, but as this is the very first nightly (not by any means a full-fledged release), expect severe bugs, crashes, and missing functionality. Many of your favorite sites will be broken. Don't expect to use this as your everyday browser. We'd love feedback on what issues folks hit the most, so w…

Kudos on reaching milestone. Can't wait to try it out. When is the Windows build will be available? Days? Week(s)?

We were hoping to make it yesterday, but ran into some issues. It's hopefully not more than a few days work.

Servo works fine, and we have an installer, but when run from the installer there are some weird things we weren't able to track down in time.

Re: Servo Nightly Builds Available

#146

Post by publicfig »

eatonphil wrote: post #119

Just opened up the MacOS build. It is pretty impressive! But the autocomplete is just awful. Typing in " http://localhost:3000" at normal speed produced " http:///localhost:300000" . Especially while it's in such a primitive developer-oriented state it would be much more useful to disable that silly autocomplete. Edit: Additionally, it doesn't yet support native keybindings like Command left-right or Alt left-right.

I doubt that there's going to be much effort into improving the HTML based browser that they're using as a shell to the engine outside of making sure you can go to a specific URL. Things like hotkeys and autocomplete are nice, but not really necessary for developing on Servo. I could be wrong on that though

Re: Servo Nightly Builds Available

#147

Post by metajack »

stshine wrote: post #107
po1nter wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have an ETA for when the Windows version might be available for us to try?

The Windows version is not availiable because mozjs the JavaScript engine, Or say, SpiderMonkey, fails to compile on windows currently, and servo developers can not know when it will be fixed. Once it can be build on windows, windows version may come out soon.

This is not true. Servo and Spidermonkey compile fine on windows using the mingw toolchain. For the MSVC toolchain we don't have that fully working, but obviously Spidermonkey is not the problem there since the official Firefox builds use MSVC. Mostly we have to fix the build glue.

The Windows port didn't ship yesterday because of technical glitches post-install. Servo works fine, but after installation it had some strange behavior we couldn't track down in time. It should come in a few days.

Re: Servo Nightly Builds Available

#148

Post by metajack »

reddotX wrote: post #94
pcwalton wrote: post #2

Happy to answer questions (when I wake up; getting this ready has been a lot of work, needless to say) :) It goes without saying, but as this is the very first nightly (not by any means a full-fledged release), expect severe bugs, crashes, and missing functionality. Many of your favorite sites will be broken. Don't expect to use this as your everyday browser. We'd love feedback on what issues folks hit the most, so w…

any change of a snap or flatpak for linux?

It's not on the immediate agenda, but we'd cerrtainly accept a PR for this. We'll get to it ourselves eventually I'm sure.

Re: Servo Nightly Builds Available

#149

Post by eatonphil »

publicfig wrote: post #146
eatonphil wrote: post #119

Just opened up the MacOS build. It is pretty impressive! But the autocomplete is just awful. Typing in " http://localhost:3000" at normal speed produced " http:///localhost:300000" . Especially while it's in such a primitive developer-oriented state it would be much more useful to disable that silly autocomplete. Edit: Additionally, it doesn't yet support native keybindings like Command left-right or Alt left-right.

I doubt that there's going to be much effort into improving the HTML based browser that they're using as a shell to the engine outside of making sure you can go to a specific URL. Things like hotkeys and autocomplete are nice, but not really necessary for developing on Servo. I could be wrong on that though

Well that's exactly the point (concerning autocomplete anyway). It would be nice to have if it worked... but right now it just gets in the way. And it's not even that relevant to the underlying engine, right?

Re: Servo Nightly Builds Available

#150

Post by metajack »

eatonphil wrote: post #119

Just opened up the MacOS build. It is pretty impressive! But the autocomplete is just awful. Typing in " http://localhost:3000" at normal speed produced " http:///localhost:300000" . Especially while it's in such a primitive developer-oriented state it would be much more useful to disable that silly autocomplete. Edit: Additionally, it doesn't yet support native keybindings like Command left-right or Alt left-right.

We found some weird edge cases with autocomplete last night, but couldn't reproduce them well. If you have some time and can reproduce it, we'd love a bug report so we can try and figure it out.
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