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Transitioning Firefox's rendering engine from Gecko to Servo

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Re: Transitioning Firefox's rendering engine from Gecko to Servo

#81

Post by andai »

reitanqild wrote: post #70
ealexhudson wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I genuinely don't get all the hoo-haa about titles. In pretty much every comments section I read here, there will be at least one person who complains that the title is "linkbait" or (more often) "clickbait" - even the most boring, anodyne description of the article. They're not allowed to seem interesting in any possible way. The original title wasn't particularly descriptive. That doesn't mean it was misleading, an…

There is a real concern among a number of users here, including me, that HN might turn into reddit if we aren't careful. That said in this case I agree with you. I also think we are mostly fine for now but I still hesitate to upvote funny comments.

Would you care to elaborate? As someone who spends about half my free time on both websites, I am experiencing a mixture of hurt and intrigue.

Re: Transitioning Firefox's rendering engine from Gecko to Servo

#82

Post by yeukhon »

losvedir wrote: post #55

Is this an announcement of a change in strategy? I'm a big fan of rust and Servo, but my understanding was that it's still "experimental" and they're learning stuff about concurrent rendering and stuff like that, with no concrete plan to use Servo in Firefox (or make Servo a standalone, supported browser). I know there's a few odds and ends in Firefox that use rust, but I thought the future of Servo was still ambiguo…

I think calling Servo "experimental" is still somewhat confusing as it stands today. I think the initiatives to implement engine in Rust is no longer an experiment. The language has gained some serious production attractions in the last year or so as Rust reached 1.0. While Rust isn't as "popular" as Go, Rust community is strong.

I think however it is better off to interpret that Mozilla is getting more serious on replacing many parts of Firefox in Rust. Mozilla already started doing that last year [1].

[1]: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2016/07/shipping-rust-in-firefox/

Re: Transitioning Firefox's rendering engine from Gecko to Servo

#85

Post by iopq »

fnj wrote: post #48
andy_ppp wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a charity with hundreds of millions in revenue and employing over 1000 people I'd call Firefox and Mozilla pretty successful.

It has enjoyed success during its lifetime, but the userbase has looked like an upside-down hockey stick for some years now. I would say that having your userbase drop from a dominant majority of the market to well below 10% of the market is indicative of failure.

Firefox gained users since October 2016

Re: Transitioning Firefox's rendering engine from Gecko to Servo

#86

Post by Ericson2314 »

stymaar wrote: post #73
quincunx wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see what you're saying, however they don't seem to be "strangling" Gecko in the Strangler-pattern sense of the word. Rather it seems they're borrowing smaller pieces (Stylo) written in a foreign language and integrating them with Gecko as the main engine. To me that sounds like the end-state is a Chimera and not a Lion, without any incremental end-user benefits along the way.

> To me that sounds like the end-state is a Chimera and not a Lion This is an aesthetic judgment. There is no such things as «a Lion» in the real world. Engineering is the work of building chimeras that solve your problems. > without any incremental end-user benefits along the way. The expected benefits are : - speed (thanks to the massive parallelization permitted by Rust «fearless concurrency») - reliability (thank…

Servo will still exist, so they'll always have the lion and the chimera.

Creating a new langauges to incrementally change and clean-slate rewrite is an orders-of-magnitude bigger investment than what either what Joel's criticizing or advocating. I don't think that article is very relevant here one way or the other.

Re: Transitioning Firefox's rendering engine from Gecko to Servo

#87

Post by mnarayan01 »

ealexhudson wrote: post #51
belorn wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does that mean that the original title was bad, as the HN guidelines states, "Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait."?

I genuinely don't get all the hoo-haa about titles. In pretty much every comments section I read here, there will be at least one person who complains that the title is "linkbait" or (more often) "clickbait" - even the most boring, anodyne description of the article. They're not allowed to seem interesting in any possible way. The original title wasn't particularly descriptive. That doesn't mean it was misleading, an…

I think the concern here is more that the blog of a "Designer Advocate at Mozilla" adds context which is totally lost when "Replacing the Jet Engine While Still Flying" appears on HN. It's a great title for the blog post, but it's both misleading and uninformative when pulled verbatim from its natural habitat.

Re: Transitioning Firefox's rendering engine from Gecko to Servo

#88

Post by falsedan »

hoorayimhelping wrote: post #79
kweinber wrote: post #72

What do folks think of internetisms that the author uses like "Because Mor Better Ideas™."? I see a number of engineers use broken phrasing like that in posts and presentations and it comes off really badly to others not in on the "joke". Does anyone really find that sort of thing actually funny or additive or is it the equivalent of trite office humor gone online?

It's annoying and unprofessional. Stop trying to be cutesy and present the information in a way that people who are busy can consume quickly and make decisions on. Is this the tone of the whole project? I'd love to contribute, but I don't want to wade through a reddit-comment-thread-level of forced references and memes to do that. I get the reason for doing it, and I like that the internet isn't full of drab corporat…

I think a lot of engineers may be hesitant about appearing boring in prose, because they haven't had a lot of experience/training in writing. Also, they not be confident that external people will be interested in the project. They try to build/maintain interesting by sprinkling it with these asides, forced references, and analogies (aping the style of other popular writers/entertainers who unfortunately aren't presenting technical information in a professional environment). They're probably aware of the drab corporate-speak & aggressively alter their style away from it avoid being mistaking for it.

Writing clear, expressive prose is hard! Plus, it's not taught as part of software engineering & it's not required to be a great engineer.

Re: Transitioning Firefox's rendering engine from Gecko to Servo

#89

Post by mozumder »

daenney wrote: post #64
mozumder wrote: post #56

Wouldn't it be more appropriate to have written rust in a GPU language like OpenGL or OpenCL, since the aim here was to replace the display engine? Curious as to why use a CPU language for the display engine rewrite? It seems to be wasting the GPU all modern systems now contain.. Also, is it fully replacing the display engine, including the font renderer and image codecs?

> Wouldn't it be more appropriate to have written rust in a GPU language like OpenGL or OpenCL, since the aim here was to replace the display engine? That's not the aim of Rust. Rust, according to its own website is: > Rust is a systems programming language that runs blazingly fast, prevents segfaults, and guarantees thread safety.

Sorry I meant 'servo' not Rust.

Re: Transitioning Firefox's rendering engine from Gecko to Servo

#90

Post by falsedan »

andai wrote: post #74
kweinber wrote: post #72

What do folks think of internetisms that the author uses like "Because Mor Better Ideas™."? I see a number of engineers use broken phrasing like that in posts and presentations and it comes off really badly to others not in on the "joke". Does anyone really find that sort of thing actually funny or additive or is it the equivalent of trite office humor gone online?

I enjoy reading words which indicate the person who wrote them is not entirely dead inside. It provides, i feel, for a Mor Better Reading Experience™

I'll be dead on the outside eventually as Grim Death's grasping claw squeezes the life out of me. Please, my time on earth is precious and I would rather spend it with my loved ones in preference to skimming over forced references.
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