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Comment by JoshTriplett | Hacker News Reader

Ideally it would be both; at a minimum, it should be a full browser engine, suitable for embedding (like WebKit, and unlike Gecko).

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I second this for diversity and safety in rendering engines if nothing else. Plus, kiosk-style systems might find good use out of it if it was lean since they can match how they develop their web apps to what Servo supports. Finally, if small and using portable layer on bottom, it could be mixed with self-healing systems like QNX or Minix 3.

Apart from Kiosk-style systems I think it might also work very well in an Electron-like setting. Supposedly, supporting only new development in the standards (i.e. without having workarounds for every quirk browsers have gathered over the years) is relatively easy, so if you could simply limit yourself to modern techniques to build Electron apps that perform better, that would be great.

Absolutely agreed; I'd love to see Servo used as a browser engine for apps. And if you fit within what Servo supports today, you can already do this. I've seen people demonstrate Android applications (written in Rust) that embed Servo.

> I've seen people demonstrate Android applications (written in Rust) that embed Servo.

Do you have a link? I went looking for information about embedding Servo and found nothing.

https://blog.mozvr.com/webvr-daydream-support-lands-in-servo... for one, though that doesn't do a very good job of using Servo as a separate module.

I can't seem to find the original example I'm thinking of that showed how to build an Android application (using cargo-apk) that embedded Servo.

You don't even need the whole web platform to build these sort of UIs -- in theory, you could use the WebRender engine to render CSS-box-like UIs. You could avoid some of the weaknesses of the web platform like the memory-heavy DOM. I think this would be an excellent target for a React Native-like framework for desktop, as it would support the full generality of CSS with excellent performance.

Qt has been doing something this for a long while: https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/stylesheet-syntax.html

QML is more comparable to what the grandparent means. Stylesheet support still works on the fairly rigid structure of nested widgets.

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