How Stylo Brought Rust and Servo to Firefox • Hacker News Board

Re: How Stylo Brought Rust and Servo to Firefox

#21

Post by tdb7893 » Tue, Nov 28, 2017, 7:55 PM UTC

throwaway613834 wrote: post #17

wyldfire wrote: post #9

Anecdote regarding this new FF: I would find frequent cases where my system would stall for 10-20s (could not caps lock toggle, pointer stopped moving). I almost always have just Chrome and gnome-terminal open (Ubuntu 16.04). I had attributed it to either a hardware or BIOS/firmware defect. Now, after switching to Firefox I have gone a week without seeing those stalls. YMMV -- I never bothered to investigate, it coul…

This sounds vaguely like what I've been experiencing on recent Chrome versions. On Windows I've had Chrome randomly hang... initially on the network, then after a few seconds even the UI freezes. When that happens, if I launch Firefox and try to access the network, it hangs too. But programs that don't try to access the network don't hang. Then after maybe (very roughly) 30 seconds, it all goes back to normal. No ide…

I notice chrome having these issues if I'm running out of memory or if another program is trying to read from the hard drive at the same time.

Re: How Stylo Brought Rust and Servo to Firefox

#22

Post by nopit » Tue, Nov 28, 2017, 8:00 PM UTC

Installed the new firefox, had 1 tab running for a few days which had allocated more than 10gb of virtual memory. I had high hopes but im sticking with chrome.

Re: How Stylo Brought Rust and Servo to Firefox

#23

Post by thomastjeffery » Tue, Nov 28, 2017, 8:01 PM UTC

> Stylo was the culmination of a near-decade of R&D, a multiple-moonshot effort to build a better browser by building a better language.

This is the most impressive, and useful aspect of all the recent work in Firefox. Rust is an amazing language. It really brings something new to the table with its borrow checker.

The fact that rust was created as part of a greater effort to work on a web browser is amazing.

Re: How Stylo Brought Rust and Servo to Firefox

#24

Post by DigitalJack » Tue, Nov 28, 2017, 8:02 PM UTC

nopit wrote: post #22

Installed the new firefox, had 1 tab running for a few days which had allocated more than 10gb of virtual memory. I had high hopes but im sticking with chrome.

Forgive my ignorance, but does having X amount of virtual memory allocated necessarily correspond to physical memory (and storage for that matter?)

Re: How Stylo Brought Rust and Servo to Firefox

#25

Post by vanderZwan » Tue, Nov 28, 2017, 8:02 PM UTC

fulafel wrote: post #12

Congratulations, it's really an unparalleled performance of parallel performance.

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 ;)

Re: How Stylo Brought Rust and Servo to Firefox

#26

Post by tjoff » Tue, Nov 28, 2017, 8:05 PM UTC

DigitalJack wrote: post #24

nopit wrote: post #22

Installed the new firefox, had 1 tab running for a few days which had allocated more than 10gb of virtual memory. I had high hopes but im sticking with chrome.

Forgive my ignorance, but does having X amount of virtual memory allocated necessarily correspond to physical memory (and storage for that matter?)

It does not (but it is a big problem for 32 bit applications where you quickly run out of addressable memory).

Re: How Stylo Brought Rust and Servo to Firefox

#27

Post by deathanatos » Tue, Nov 28, 2017, 8:09 PM UTC

DigitalJack wrote: post #24

nopit wrote: post #22

Installed the new firefox, had 1 tab running for a few days which had allocated more than 10gb of virtual memory. I had high hopes but im sticking with chrome.

Forgive my ignorance, but does having X amount of virtual memory allocated necessarily correspond to physical memory (and storage for that matter?)

No, it doesn't necessarily correspond. It could be an indicator, though. RSS would be more useful, IMO.

That said, even if the poster is correct, it isn't necessarily wrong either. AFAICT, nothing stops JS on a page from allocating that much memory, and "leaking" it (e.g., holding on to the JS object, maybe accidentally in a giant list, and not making use of it). It isn't the browser's fault if JS is actually "using" that much RAM.

Re: How Stylo Brought Rust and Servo to Firefox

#28

Post by ticklemyelmo » Tue, Nov 28, 2017, 8:11 PM UTC

thomastjeffery wrote: post #23

> Stylo was the culmination of a near-decade of R&D, a multiple-moonshot effort to build a better browser by building a better language. This is the most impressive, and useful aspect of all the recent work in Firefox. Rust is an amazing language. It really brings something new to the table with its borrow checker. The fact that rust was created as part of a greater effort to work on a web browser is amazing.

Having trouble calculating the motion of bodies due to gravity, better invent calculus.

Re: How Stylo Brought Rust and Servo to Firefox

#29

Post by agentultra » Tue, Nov 28, 2017, 8:12 PM UTC

This is a great story. For large, existing code-bases incremental change is the only strategy I've seen work. Kudos to the team behind it.

Re: How Stylo Brought Rust and Servo to Firefox

#30

Post by thomastjeffery » Tue, Nov 28, 2017, 8:13 PM UTC

> the breadth of the web platform is staggering. It grew organically over almost three decades, has no clear limits in scope, and has lots of tricky observables that thwart attempts to simplify.

It would be great to create the html/css/javascript stack from scratch, or at least make a non-backwards-compatible version that is simpler and can perform better. HTML5 showed us that can work.