Hacker News Reader

Getting data to and from the FPGA, and the workload being significantly pointer-chasing based, would probably nullify any advantage an FPGA could have.

Realistically, you'd use the FPGA as your NIC.

Because web rendering is already fast and hardware driven. The slowness comes from unnecessary frameworks and bad developers.

For example that card graphic mentions Virtual DOM, which isn’t a technology. It’s bullshit that comes with the React framework.

Don't modern browsers already use GPU acceleration?

Do they acceleration DOM parsing, or just media that already has acceleration hooks provided by the OS?

DOM parsing is an almost perfect job for a CPU to do and not really something for dedicated hardware.

Firefox uses the GPU via WebRender[0]. I don't know what specific things it's used for, but I'm pretty sure it's not any of the DOM parsing. The GPU is used for the actual graphical rendering down the line -- compositing and such[1].

[0] https://github.com/servo/webrender

[1] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/10/the-whole-web-at-maximum-f...

HTML renderer? Maybe not. But perhaps you could make a FPGA that's good at running whatever bytecode your JavaScript engine lowers scripts to.