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How Stylo Brought Rust and Servo to Firefox

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Re: How Stylo Brought Rust and Servo to Firefox

#171

Post by Vinnl »

This is a great write-up that gives me warm fuzzy feelings.

What also is interesting for me to realise, though, is that a lot of this was happening at the same time as Mozilla was largely focused on Firefox OS, and receiving a lot of flak for that.

It's a shame that Firefox OS failed, but it was clear that they had to try many different things to remain relevant, and it's excellent to see that one of those is very likely to pay off. Even though Rust might've been dismissed for the same reasons Firefox OS was.

Re: How Stylo Brought Rust and Servo to Firefox

#172

Post by hsivonen »

noir_lord wrote: post #100
steveklabnik wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A URL parser takes a string with a URL in it, and returns some sort of data structure that represents the URL. It's complex because URLs are complex; I believe this is the correct RFC: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3986 It's 60 pages long. (That said, page length is only a proxy for complexity, of course)

As someone who once tried to write code to do it to avoid pulling in a dependency. Never again, it's not just that the spec is 60 pages long but that the actual behaviour out in the real world is miles away from the spec, the web is a complex place where standards are...rarely standard.

When writing code it's a much better idea to write according to https://url.spec.whatwg.org/

Re: How Stylo Brought Rust and Servo to Firefox

#173

Post by sjwright »

Sammi wrote: post #160
sjwright wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's weird to describe [LLVM] as "Apple's" It's equally weird to describe Android as "Google's".

Are you being sarcastic? Because Android is very much Google's. Is there anyone else who has anywhere close to as much influence on the development of Android as Google has? Android is for the most part being developed behind closed doors at Google. About once a year they lob over a bunch of new code over the fence, and everyone else gets to develop from there.

It's an argument from absurdity. Nobody would say Android isn't Google's project, even though it wasn't started by Google, and wasn't written exclusively by Google employees.

Same applies to LLVM. The only reason it might not seem a fair comparison is that Apple has run LLVM as a truly open source endeavour, whereas Android (which marketed itself to geeks as the more open platform) has, as you rightly point out, been run as a closed-source project with occasional begrudging nods to its ever-shrinking open source subset.

Re: How Stylo Brought Rust and Servo to Firefox

#174

Post by pimeys »

haberman wrote: post #16

I'm a huge, huge fan of Rust, Stylo, Servo, WebRender, etc. Hats off to everyone involved.

Yeah. I got a taste of Rust in the last two years and it's the first tool set I really want to continue using. And it gave me the interest to dig into systems programming. I'm very grateful for that!

Re: How Stylo Brought Rust and Servo to Firefox

#175

Post by pimeys »

wldcordeiro wrote: post #72
vanderZwan wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking of which: does anyone know if some new optimization land in the beta versions a couple of days ago? Or if some bug that caused delays on Linux got fixed? I updated my developer version yesterday and it was as if Firefox - already ludicrously fast compared to before - turned on the turbo booster. Obviously, I'm not complaining ;)

The next Servo component is webrender and I'm not certain on if it has been flagged to on for developer edition but that would certainly affect speed.

It's only on nightly and still buggy on certain chipsets. At home I have a Kaby Lake system and using WebRender for daily browsing without problems. At work I use a Skylake system which has trouble with some sites, such as https://tradingview.com

If you want to read the latest info, there is a good status post from a couple of days ago:

https://mozillagfx.wordpress.com/2017/11/27/webrender-newsle...

Re: How Stylo Brought Rust and Servo to Firefox

#176

Post by lucideer »

mjw1007 wrote: post #96
aidenn0 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Joel's defense, we don't know that gecko is better than X years of incremental changes to Netscape 4. One of the big issues with software engineering advice is that it is really hard to find apples-to-apples comparisons for outcomes.

True. I think we can say that Gecko ended up technically better than incremental changes to Internet Explorer, which I think was starting off from a more maintainable codebase than Netscape 4. That's hardly conclusive but it's some evidence.

> we can say that Gecko ended up technically better than incremental changes to Internet Explorer

> ...

> That's hardly conclusive but it's some evidence.

Given Internet Explorer's monopoly position, and consequent disincentive to compete, it's not really the best comparison.

Compare to something like Opera Presto, a codebase that - while younger than Netscape - predates Internet Explorer, which underwent incremental changes while remaining in a minority market position. It was killed by market forces, but I doubt anyone would contest it was a badly put together piece of software in the end.

Konqueror is another example. It's not quite as compelling, as KHTML itself has fared less well than its forks, Safari WebKit has never exactly been a leader in engine advancement, and Chrome's innovations, while incremental, were largely built on a scratch-rewrite-and-launch-all-at-once of one component (V8). However KHTML/Webkit/Blink is still pretty much an incremental rewrite success story.

Re: How Stylo Brought Rust and Servo to Firefox

#177

Post by iopq »

lucideer wrote: post #176
mjw1007 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True. I think we can say that Gecko ended up technically better than incremental changes to Internet Explorer, which I think was starting off from a more maintainable codebase than Netscape 4. That's hardly conclusive but it's some evidence.

> we can say that Gecko ended up technically better than incremental changes to Internet Explorer > ... > That's hardly conclusive but it's some evidence. Given Internet Explorer's monopoly position, and consequent disincentive to compete, it's not really the best comparison. Compare to something like Opera Presto, a codebase that - while younger than Netscape - predates Internet Explorer, which underwent incremental…

I actually used Opera because it allowed me to stop websites from hijacking my browser. No capturing my right click or any of this silly bullshit. The exact UI/features I want. Opera 6-12 were good times.

Re: How Stylo Brought Rust and Servo to Firefox

#178

Post by iopq »

qznc wrote: post #161
wyager wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is there anything specific about Rust that you don’t think a commercial organisation would do? A good job. Most commercial PL efforts kind of suck. There are a small number of exceptions, and Rust is one of them.

Java, C#, Ada, JavaScript, etc are more successful that Rust. The comparison is not good though because Rust is younger. You could argue survivorship bias but that applies to Rust as well.

They're more successful, but programming in Java and JavaScript is pretty painful (albeit in different ways).

Re: How Stylo Brought Rust and Servo to Firefox

#179

Post by nicalsilva »

mi_lk wrote: post #124

Off-topic, but does anyone know why in FF on Mac the pinch to zoom functionality is disabled by default? Is there any performance concern?

It's a matter of allocating time to implement the missing parts and get it to work properly. Right now the people who could do this are working on other things but it will get done eventually.

Re: How Stylo Brought Rust and Servo to Firefox

#180

Post by littlestymaar »

digi_owl wrote: post #125
pvg wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn't the original Mozilla leading into Firefox wildly successful, though? It certainly put a dent in IE's market share. The opposite has been true for Chrome so it seems their recent history is not one of successful adaptation.

The first thing to consider is that MS let IE stagnate, and had large deviations from W3C standards. Mozilla rode in on the cry for standard adherence. Chrome on the other hand is not stagnant, far from it. And Google is not letting Chrome stagnate. Never mind that Google is using their marketing muscle to push Chrome every chance they get. Just try downloading some shareware on Windows, and you are bound to get Chro…

> Chrome on the other hand is not stagnant, far from it. And Google is not letting Chrome stagnate.

That's not Brendan Eich's point of view as part of the tc39 (the standardization body for JavaScript) :

https://youtu.be/gO2tt9x9zBc?t=11m58s

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