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Gosub – An open-source browser engine

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Re: Gosub – An open-source browser engine

#31

Post by diggan »

mjrpes wrote: post #16
johnwbyrd wrote: post #8

Yes, but I'm concerned about the number of existing browser engines that have fallen by the wayside, as the project founders have become exhausted. The scope of such a project is incredibly easy to underestimate, and it has only ever gotten larger. Some examples: https://www.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/124kphe/what_do_y...

All I have to do is stumble upon a heated 100+ post discussion on the implementation details of an arcane feature of CSS to understand how mammoth an undertaking it must be to develop a fully compatible browser engine.

> develop a fully compatible browser engine

Do we need more "fully compatible" engines? I could imagine there are use cases for browser engines that work with just parts of the specification, particularly the most common ones used in the wild.

Re: Gosub – An open-source browser engine

#34

Post by ratmice »

chasil wrote: post #14

Would a fork of Chromium that was restricted to MISRA-C/C++ offer any real security advantages? Would parts of Chromium be fundamentally incompatible with these standards? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MISRA_C

I would think the MISRA rules against dynamic memory allocation would present serious difficulty if not fundamental incompatibility when trying to implement web standards.

Re: Gosub – An open-source browser engine

#36

Post by sharktheone »

joshmarinacci wrote: post #28

Former Mozilla employee here. The fact that they are writing their own bytestream abstraction does not bode well. That said, I hope they succeed at shipping something, even if it’s not competitive with Chrome. My previous thoughts on the topic: Why you can’t build a web browser and why you should anyway. https://joshondesign.com/2022/12/14/browser_1000_loc

The byte stream is one of the first components that was written. Probably It wouldn't be written nowadays. The browser is quite modular, so in the end you can completely out out of that system.

Re: Gosub – An open-source browser engine

#37

Post by joshmarinacci »

diggan wrote: post #30
joshmarinacci wrote: post #28

Former Mozilla employee here. The fact that they are writing their own bytestream abstraction does not bode well. That said, I hope they succeed at shipping something, even if it’s not competitive with Chrome. My previous thoughts on the topic: Why you can’t build a web browser and why you should anyway. https://joshondesign.com/2022/12/14/browser_1000_loc

> The fact that they are writing their own bytestream abstraction does not bode well. You want to elaborate on why exactly? Seems like a kind of shallow dismissal, but then I'm no browser engine developer exactly, maybe it's obvious.

You can only do so much, so success depends on which components you decide to reuse. I wouldn’t build a new database or filesystem abstraction from scratch, for example.

Rust has lots of bytestream abstractions already with a ton of work put into them. Maybe they have a valid reason for going their own way. I’d like to know.

Re: Gosub – An open-source browser engine

#39

Post by porphyra »

chasil wrote: post #14

Would a fork of Chromium that was restricted to MISRA-C/C++ offer any real security advantages? Would parts of Chromium be fundamentally incompatible with these standards? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MISRA_C

Sounds very hard. For example, Rule 21.3 in MISRA C 2012 basically prohibits dynamic memory allocation (e.g. malloc, calloc, realloc, free). Implementing a browser with such restrictions would be quite misrable.

Re: Gosub – An open-source browser engine

#40

Post by spoiler »

dustedcodes wrote: post #25

Why does it matter if it’s written in Rust?

A few thing from the top of my head:

- Might be interesting to integretors (FFI, dylib, Rust projects)

- Signals some characters: that it's probably safer than alternatives written in non memory safe languages in same class, has good performance

- Might attract contributors (ie I'm sure there's an intersection of people passionate abou the web and Rust)

- This is hacker news, so it might earn a few extra +1s :P

Edit: formatting

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