Hacking Servo for Noobs | Hacker News Reader

Hacking Servo for Noobs

gist.github.com

85 pointsash9 comments

I have made some small contributions or tried to, to some open source projects in the past and I must say, Servo has been the most welcoming and most beginner friendly. The team has clearly made it a priority and it shows.

Personally for me the hardest part has been finding easy issues. While the Servo team does a great job of creating them, there's a lot of people vying for them. And then, even harder, progressing from these to bigger harder issues, which is where I'm still at.

It's a real challenge keeping those good first issues (https://github.com/servo/servo/labels/E-easy ) around! It seems like no matter how many we make, they're claimed within a day or two and fixed within a week. Hopefully, as you and others progress to bigger and harder issues, you'll be able to help us open some more of those good first ones :-)

That is overall what I have found in the Rust community. Everyone is always helpful and the community is very welcoming. This is good for Rust lang, as by its self, is not the most noob friendly.

Nice to hear :)

I'm actually working on making rustc easier to contribute to. It's already not very hard to work on (you don't need to submit groundbreaking patches to borrowck for a first bug, plenty of easier things to work on!), but the framework that helps newcomers ease into contribution needs work.

https://users.rust-lang.org/t/mentoring-newcomers-to-the-rus...

(Currently I'm cleaning up the easy issues list and adding hints/pointers to the questions)

If you have any specific feedback, I'd love to hear it!

This is great!

Something I'd love to see is an overview of what parts of the source tree are responsible for what. As a new contributor to projects, that's the part I find takes the longest. Figuring out what modules do the things that I want to work on.

The guts of servo seems to be the the "components" directory. Is there a place that gives some information on each of the components in there?

I did some training at our last Mozilla workweek that covered the major areas of Servo and had some simple exercises to get you started in each of them:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9-EBhw4XiWEOWFfc0NiUkk5Tjg...

Servo has polyrepo style (many separate source repositories), as opposed to the monorepo style of other browsers. So, it's not just the `components` directory, but many of the ~140 other Cargo crates (https://crates.io/) and raw GitHub packages that come together to form Servo. I have a "deliverable" for Q4 to improve our documentation situation and explain how it all is put together, though this gist is an awesome start!

https://github.com/servo/servo/blob/master/ORGANIZATION.md has a REALLY high-level overview.

I'm new to this, could someone give me a gist of why Servo is trending?

Servo is a new web browser rendering engine by Mozilla, written in a new programming language called Rust, which is safe language that runs as fast as C/C++. Servo is expected to be more performant on modern CPUs than the rendering engines used by current web browsers. People are excited both by Servo and by Rust.

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