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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

#181

Post by robin_reala »

pawelk wrote: post #168
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.

And, as far as I know, Microsoft has developed Edge from scratch after all. The years of incremental updates to IE are now maintained for legacy support.

That’s incorrect. Edge is still Trident, but they took the opportunity of a change in name to rip out all of the old backwards-compatibility layers and leave just the modern stuff.

Re: How Stylo Brought Rust and Servo to Firefox

#182

Post by GeekyBear »

fulafel wrote: post #63
sp332 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does this just mean LLVM? Because it's weird to describe it as "Apple's", Apple just uses it.

It's slightly oversimplified. Apple hired Chris Lattner from academia to ramp up work on LLVM & create Clang. (Apple always hated GNU stuff so the motive might not have been purely technical.)

There were a couple of purely technical reasons for Apple to pursue Clang.

1.) GCC was designed for command line use, not to provide integration (for instance, debugging info) into a modern IDE.

2.) Objective-C was not a priority for those who maintained GCC, but was for Apple.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clang

Re: How Stylo Brought Rust and Servo to Firefox

#183

Post by pohl »

wongarsu wrote: post #44
stingraycharles wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I wonder, and I do not mean this in negative way, is whether this would have happened in a more commercially oriented organisation. Mozilla remains a foundation, and I consider Rust a fruit of their labour in itself. To put it another way, I find it hard to justify developing Rust just for a web browser. But if you consider it from the perspective of a foundation developing tools for the developer community as a…

A classic example would be Erlang, which was developed at Ericsson for use in telephone exchanges.

Thank you for posting this. I was just about to post a question to which this is a good answer:

When was the last time someone invented a programming language in order to make a thing, and succeeded? Was it C/Unix?

Re: How Stylo Brought Rust and Servo to Firefox

#184

Post by fulafel »

GeekyBear wrote: post #182
fulafel wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's slightly oversimplified. Apple hired Chris Lattner from academia to ramp up work on LLVM & create Clang. (Apple always hated GNU stuff so the motive might not have been purely technical.)

There were a couple of purely technical reasons for Apple to pursue Clang. 1.) GCC was designed for command line use, not to provide integration (for instance, debugging info) into a modern IDE. 2.) Objective-C was not a priority for those who maintained GCC, but was for Apple. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clang

The Objective-C story is a little more complicated. Originally Apple had a hostile fork of GCC and even initially refused to provide source code until the FSF lawyers got involved. It's a small wonder the GCC Objective-C support is as good as it is considering the politics.

Debugging info works similarly in all compilers (GCC, MSVC etc) - it's saved in the compiler output and read by the tools like IDEs.

Re: How Stylo Brought Rust and Servo to Firefox

#185

Post by aidenn0 »

majewsky wrote: post #167
aidenn0 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought traditional WMs had the clients send the draw commands directly to the server, rather than doing any compositing themselves? It's definitely true that different GPUs have different power profiles (and even the same GPU with different drivers).

No Qt or GTK application sends draw commands to the X server anymore (except for the final "draw window-sized pixmap"). That only applies to xterm or maybe Tcl/Tk stuff.

This still isn't compositing. If I have 10 windows all with the same X/Y coordinates, the only window sending any draw commands at all is the top window with a traditional wm.

Re: How Stylo Brought Rust and Servo to Firefox

#186

Post by BuckRogers »

overhang wrote: post #129
stingraycharles wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I wonder, and I do not mean this in negative way, is whether this would have happened in a more commercially oriented organisation. Mozilla remains a foundation, and I consider Rust a fruit of their labour in itself. To put it another way, I find it hard to justify developing Rust just for a web browser. But if you consider it from the perspective of a foundation developing tools for the developer community as a…

Imagine if some company were to make a completely new language just for an IDE.

Kotlin and C# are two examples that fit the bill. If that's what you're looking for.

Re: How Stylo Brought Rust and Servo to Firefox

#187

Post by olavk »

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.

Yeah but Microsoft let IE stagnate for half a decade after it had achieved dominance. There were 5 years between IE 6 and IE 7. If MS hadn't disbanded the IE team but had kept up the pace of incremental development, I very much doubt Mozilla would have ever been able to catch up again.

I would say Joels point still holds in the general case where you you can't count on competitors to just stop developing their product until you have achieved parity again.

Re: How Stylo Brought Rust and Servo to Firefox

#188

Post by BuckRogers »

labster wrote: post #147
steveklabnik wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't work on Firefox, but you should file bugs. I've generally had a pretty good time doing so.

I've enjoyed filing bugs too, but my first bug is about to celebrate its 10th birthday. Hopefully it will be fixed before it can legally drive a car.

While that's a long time, in 10 years you could've contributed a fix by yourself. At this point one should consider it a reminder!

Re: How Stylo Brought Rust and Servo to Firefox

#189

Post by mjw1007 »

olavk wrote: post #187
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.

Yeah but Microsoft let IE stagnate for half a decade after it had achieved dominance. There were 5 years between IE 6 and IE 7. If MS hadn't disbanded the IE team but had kept up the pace of incremental development, I very much doubt Mozilla would have ever been able to catch up again. I would say Joels point still holds in the general case where you you can't count on competitors to just stop developing their produc…

IE6 was released about the same time as Mozilla 0.9.3. I think Mozilla was already ahead in technical terms at that point.

Certainly it had better CSS support, and on my machine it crashed less.

The important difference was a matter of support for "official" standards against support for "best viewed in Internet Explorer" sites.

Re: How Stylo Brought Rust and Servo to Firefox

#190

Post by haberman »

pcwalton wrote: post #19
haberman wrote: post #16

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

Thanks for the kind words!

You're welcome! I guess while I'm at it I should mention that I am a huge fan of your HN comments also. I learn more from them on a technical level than probably anyone else on this site.
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