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Servo’s new home

blog.servo.org

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Re: Servo’s new home

#311

Post by oatmealsnap »

lastontheboat wrote: post #101
coddle-hark wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Electron (WebKit) is much more than a rendering engine though. Sure, you could use Servo in a desktop app, but you’d have to also bundle all the other browser components (a JS engine, for example) individually. You’re basically building a browser at that point.

Servo currently incorporates a network stack, a JS engine, the DOM, JS APIs, an HTML parser, a CSS styling engine, graphical rendering, media parsing and playback, etc. It is not a browser, since it doesn't impose requirements about how to load specific pages, interact with tabs, expose history or bookmarks, etc.

Could it be used as a Linux desktop environment? I.e. Alternative to Gnome?

I would love to be able to contribute improvements to the desktop environments I use, but I don’t have the time to learn languages that aren’t applicable to my daily work.

Re: Servo’s new home

#312

Post by tsimionescu »

Deukhoofd wrote: post #284
tsimionescu wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'an engine', but people who choose Electron typically don't want a rendering engine like Servo, they want to write a web app and have it installed locally. They need a rendering engine, a JS runtime, a DOM handler, an HTTP client library, WebSockets support etc - they want a whole browser. Also, 150MB is not really that scary of a size in today's world. Also, a huge part of it is simply…

> Also note that vim with all its dependencies is ~40 MB, without a GUI That's mostly just due to vim-runtime though, and the documentation in many different languages. The actual vim executable is around 3 MB.

Can the vim executable run without vim-runtime, or the other shared libaries it installz? I don't know the internal architecture of vim, I am genuinely asking.

Re: Servo’s new home

#313

Post by ygjb »

eitland wrote: post #292
ygjb wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, you can donate money to develop Firefox, but it's not a core part of Mozilla's business model to support that. Instead you would need to track down an OSS developer that is either an active contributor, or who is willing to work on Firefox, and then sponsor their work through a number of different contributor pathways. There are Github sponsorships, direct funding, or any of the options here - https://itsfoss.c…

> Sure, you can donate money to develop Firefox, My understanding: I'm fairly sure they've said they are not allowed to direct money from the Foundation to Mozilla Corporation, and it kind of makes sense until you realize it is the coroporation that creates the outcome you want not the other way around. Also - from my point of view it looks like the Foundation is overfunded the last few years while the guys who creat…

You are correct; you can't direct money to Mozilla to develop Firefox, by way of the foundation. You can fund OSS contributors, not Mozilla staff (and they are well funded already, to work on Firefox).

Re: Servo’s new home

#314

Post by chubot »

Frondo wrote: post #295
dang wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't mean that all of your posts were that way, only some of them. Can I try my luck at persuading you a little? The reason we moderate like this is not because of morality or taste. It's because of the dynamics of a community of HN's size. The goal is simply to have a community that doesn't suck. That is in all our interests, including yours, as you're participating here. There are other internet communities, sm…

Holy shit, Dan! I just gained so much respect for you as a moderator (and therefore participant) in this community. Taking the time to write out this very thoughtful, insightful reply to someone who may be knowledgeable but was throwing out hostile one-liners, that is impressive and gives such a great deal of credibility to the work you're doing here -- work that largely goes unseen, of course. Amazing. (I actually p…

Yeah honestly someone should try to make an AI clone of dang :) I think that would go along way toward solving the problems of the Internet...

I'm sorta joking but also serious because there is a big corpus to train from :)

Re: Servo’s new home

#315

Post by andrewmcwatters »

supermatt wrote: post #308
andrewmcwatters wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Servo has been around for 8 years. If embedding was a primary aim, which it clearly isn’t, you’d start with that first, and enjoy spec compliance updates as they came.

As I stated, it IS embeddable. It just isn’t as user friendly as the off-the-shelf libs you mention you are familiar with. I’m really not understanding your hate. Servo is a WIP. If you don’t have the time/skills to embed it in its current state, then don’t! But it’s still embeddable :)

You're right, I should take a look at all the great apps using Servo to figure out how to use it myself.

Re: Servo’s new home

#316

Post by int_19h »

tsimionescu wrote: post #280
LockAndLol wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The latter would be better, imo. Chromium won because it introduced a sane API before Mozilla's Gecko. That's why you see so many Electron apps. Seriously, we don't need to wrap a whole browser. Just the engine and a debugger would've been fine. The engine could be distributed as a lib and other frameworks could just bind it. Apps could be distributed without an 150MB behemoth just to have a chat client. Making the e…

I'm not sure what you mean by 'an engine', but people who choose Electron typically don't want a rendering engine like Servo, they want to write a web app and have it installed locally. They need a rendering engine, a JS runtime, a DOM handler, an HTTP client library, WebSockets support etc - they want a whole browser. Also, 150MB is not really that scary of a size in today's world. Also, a huge part of it is simply…

> Also, 150MB is not really that scary of a size in today's world

That very much depends on where you live.

Re: Servo’s new home

#318

Post by devwastaken »

jhoechtl wrote: post #214
devwastaken wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Servo last time I checked used the same if not more memory (100MB) for basic pages. There doesn't appear to be major differences for that application yet.

Why should there be any great difference? Firefox is already written in a language where compilers have been optimized since decades. Rust will not bring that magic.

Hypothetically there should be possibilities for significant memory reduction by being able to deploy only what you need from the runtime instead of having everything loaded at once.

The memory usage part isn't really apart of rust or C, but rather that projects like chromium require significant hoops to jump through if you wanted to compile electron with only what you need.

I expect that servo will be tackling this issue, the browser works standalone and that's a hefty achievement in itself.

Re: Servo’s new home

#319

Post by webmaven »

pjmlp wrote: post #301
webmaven wrote: post #157

This is encouraging. An Electron competitor would be really nice. I'd be especially interested in an Electron-but-for-Python, along the lines of PythonWebkit: https://www.gnu.org/software/pythonwebkit/

The Electron competitor is called the Web platform. Just write your application in Django and start the local browser. Use Web APIs to trigger interactions with native APIs from Python code.

Okay, so I'm curious as to why you think desktop applications are ever built as Electron apps rather than just as a local web app server that opens the desktop browser?

After all, that approach was pioneered by Dave Winer around 2000 or so, and never really caught on. On the other hand, Electron has exploded as a platform.

Re: Servo’s new home

#320

Post by webmaven »

olah_1 wrote: post #302
webmaven wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice! Okay, so now I want Tauri-but-for-Python.

They are adding bindings to other languages like Python in Q1 2021 (so says their website)

Thanks for pointing that out. I wonder if the Python etc. APIs will be full peers of the Rust and JS ones, including the same access to the DOM.

I'll keep an eye on the project.

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