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I tried Servo

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Re: I tried Servo

#171

Post by cosmic_cheese »

jpc0 wrote: post #109
echelon wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Questions for the Rust UX experts: Is Dioxus (or Leptos) much more performant than Tauri/Electron? I want to (1) build blindingly fast, low-latency, super performant UX for users, which precludes Tauri/Electron (something I'm currently using and unhappy about), but I also want to (2) maintain developer velocity, (3) have access to nice UX primitives and widgets, and (4) have it look nice and modern. Javascript/browse…

> I want to (1) build blindingly fast, low-latency, super performant UX for users, … (2) maintain developer velocity, (3) have access to nice UX primitives and widgets … (4) have it look nice and modern. Find me when you find this, because I actually think it is impossible. I think there is fundamentally too much inherent complexity to abstract away to keep 2 and not sacrifice 1. Specifically for something properly c…

I believe it’s possible, but it’s going to take a little bit of outside of the box thinking in that it’d be most practical if the UI toolkit isn’t bound strictly to a single paradigm.

Both imperative and declarative UIs have serious problems. Imperative toolkits can get hairy with their boilerplate and can make staying in sync with data state a real challenge, while declarative toolkits have a strong tendency towards rigidity that makes for awkward DX and ugly code in all but the simplest todo app kind of examples and don’t lend themselves to fine grained control.

I think there’s a happy medium to be found between the two in a well-designed hybrid. This hypothetical framework would allow full declarative in situations where that’s highly suitable, but would also allow the dev to do widget configuration in a more traditional imperative style or if necessary fall back to full imperative. Support for reactivity on both sides of the coin would be robust so staying in lockstep with data is simplified.

This would bring down boilerplate substantially since the broader layout of most screens could be done declaratively, but it wouldn’t come at the cost of more advanced functionality, flexibility, and developer control on the individual widget level.

I’d like to dig further into these ideas at some point if I get time.

Re: I tried Servo

#172

Post by rapnie »

usrusr wrote: post #170
echelon wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Questions for the Rust UX experts: Is Dioxus (or Leptos) much more performant than Tauri/Electron? I want to (1) build blindingly fast, low-latency, super performant UX for users, which precludes Tauri/Electron (something I'm currently using and unhappy about), but I also want to (2) maintain developer velocity, (3) have access to nice UX primitives and widgets, and (4) have it look nice and modern. Javascript/browse…

Makepad is neither gtk generation nor browser based. Might check the "just text/button widget" box though, I'd certainly place it on the minimalistic end of the spectrum. (haven't worked with makepad, just enjoyed the demo)

Makepad [0] is indeed quite impressive. You can directly try Makepad Studio in your browser [1]. Don't know if that's the latest or the demo version. Their demo vids are a good watch.

[0] https://makepad.nl

[1] https://makepad.dev

Re: I tried Servo

#173

Post by argomo »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #82
nicce wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is difficult to get people to pay for it. People happily pay for 10€ beer but asked ”friends” about how to bypass WhatsApp’s 0,99 lifetime licenses.

And it's impossible to get people to pay for it when you give them no way to pay for it.

https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/what-you-can-do/?form=d...

Re: I tried Servo

#174

Post by GuB-42 »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #65

I feel like Mozilla is going to join the annals of history with the likes of Xerox in the category of "Companies that created the technology of the future and casually tossed it to the wayside for competitors to scoop up" with Rust and Servo. It's mind-boggling that for a company so often seemingly playing catch-up with Google, Mozilla actually leapfrogged Google in the browser development space for a time, and then.…

Mozilla is nothing like Xerox, if anything Google is the new Xerox: they have way too much money so they throw it at R&D side projects without a business plan.

The big one for Google is transformer models, they basically invented LLMs only to play catchup with OpenAI later.

Mozilla successes have always been focused on the web browser, from the very beginning. Even the name reflects that: "Mozilla" stands for "Mosaic killer", Mosaic was the leading web browser at the time. They beat Mosaic with Netscape, they beat IE with Firefox, beating Chrome was their mission, and Rust and Servo were their weapons. It is sad that they dropped the ball.

Like Xerox (and Google), Mozilla tried doing some side projects, but unlike Xerox, they didn't have money to burn from their quasi-monopolies, and I can't think of anything particularly innovative coming from Mozilla that isn't a browser. I don't consider Rust to be a side project, it is a programming language for writing a browser, that it is useful for projects other than a web browser is a happy side effect.

Re: I tried Servo

#175

Post by paddim8 »

YmiYugy wrote: post #23
ObscureScience wrote: post #3

While it's hard to know what comes of it, there is also https://ladybird.org/ to challenge to monopoly of Blink.

I just don't get the point of ladybird. They have full time engineers and are soliciting donations, so it's clearly more than a hobby project. Maybe my assumptions are off, but I just can't imagine they could ever become competitive in terms of features, security and performance with the big engines. Blink is setting the pace, Webkit is barely able to keep up and Gecko is slowly falling behind. All of these teams are…

Well Andreas Kling has worked on Safari and WebKit and (obviously) has talked to a lot of browser people. He knows what he is doing, and he frequently says that no one that has actually worked on a browser thinks it's impossible to create a new one, even with a small team (...of highly motivated and skilled people).

Re: I tried Servo

#176

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

argomo wrote: post #173
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it's impossible to get people to pay for it when you give them no way to pay for it.

https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/what-you-can-do/?form=d...

https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/donate/help/#frequently...

> How will my donation be used?

> These funds directly support advocacy campaigns (i.e. asking big tech companies to protect your privacy), research and publications like the *Privacy Not Included buyer's guide and Internet Health Report, and covers a portion of our annual MozFest gathering.

Notice what donations aren't used for: Firefox.

Re: I tried Servo

#177

Post by paddim8 »

fabrice_d wrote: post #84
throw839340949r wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ladybird has better results in web rendering tests than Servo, and slowly is gaining on Firefox. They are already quite competitive.

Ladybird is extremely slow, it's far from being competitive at all.

What? No one is expecting Ladybird to be fast at this stage. No one is claiming that it is. Ladybird is competitive because of the speed of which it is improving.

Re: I tried Servo

#178

Post by paddim8 »

mdaniel wrote: post #93
BrawnyBadger53 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is more to a project this massive than its choice of language. For me though it's mostly about breaking from the monopoly and putting a check on Google's influence over browser space.

> There is more to a project this massive than its choice of language For writing a game, or Figma replacement, or some cutesy something that runs on your machine without requiring network access, probably. For one of the most impactful applications that downloads untrusted code from the Internet and executes it without any confirmation whatsoever, the language for sure does matter. "Chrome RCE" is a phrase that stri…

Well that's why they're going to rewrite parts of the code where those things are more likely in Swift

Re: I tried Servo

#179

Post by bee_rider »

GuB-42 wrote: post #174
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #65

I feel like Mozilla is going to join the annals of history with the likes of Xerox in the category of "Companies that created the technology of the future and casually tossed it to the wayside for competitors to scoop up" with Rust and Servo. It's mind-boggling that for a company so often seemingly playing catch-up with Google, Mozilla actually leapfrogged Google in the browser development space for a time, and then.…

Mozilla is nothing like Xerox, if anything Google is the new Xerox: they have way too much money so they throw it at R&D side projects without a business plan. The big one for Google is transformer models, they basically invented LLMs only to play catchup with OpenAI later. Mozilla successes have always been focused on the web browser, from the very beginning. Even the name reflects that: "Mozilla" stands for "Mosaic…

> […] and I can't think of anything particularly innovative coming from Mozilla that isn't a browser. I don't consider Rust to be a side project, it is a programming language for writing a browser, that it is useful for projects other than a web browser is a happy side effect.

I’m sure Rust started out as something intended to help with their browser work. But it became a general purpose programming language pretty early, right? I think it is… working pretty hard to find a reason to not include Rust as a innovative, non-browser piece of tech.

Anyway, I don’t really think it detracts from your broader point to count Rust as a separate thing from the browser.

Re: I tried Servo

#180

Post by goku12 »

nicoburns wrote: post #118
goku12 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (Taffy [0]) that can be used standalone and is widely used accross the Rust UI ecosystem, including in the Blitz [1] web engine (which also uses Taffy for Flexbox and Block layout) This is the first time I hear about Blitz. Looks equally interesting and ambitious. It is probably the real undercover web engine. Servo was widely known around when Rust debuted.

> this is the first time I hear about Blitz. Looks equally interesting and ambitious. It is probably the real undercover web engine It's certainly a newer and lesser-known engine. It's mostly been me working on it for the past year or so (with a couple of other occasional contributors). But I do have funding to work on it full time through DioxusLabs (who are building Dioxus Native - a Flutter / React Native competit…

You have my admiration and support for this work! I guess it goes without saying how monumental and critical the work on alternative engines like servo and libweb are. We are genuinely tired of the current duopoly (I'm starting to lose hope with Firefox and gecko as well. They seem to have priorities different to our expectations.) But I guess we now have one more to look forward to, thanks to you and the rest of the team! Personally, I hope to pitch in as soon as I have some spare time available. Regards!
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