Hacker News Reader

Comment by abraxas | Hacker News Reader

Wasn't Rust developed specifically for Mozilla? Isn't mozilla written in Rust?

Only parts of it. Servo is the engine written in Rust, some of which ended up in Mozilla.

Firefox has some Rust components but it isn't written in Rust overall. Servo is written in Rust but it isn't a full browser.

Servo is slowly but steadily getting there. The thing with Servo is that it's highly modularized and some of its components are widely used by the larger Rust ecosystem, even it the whole browser engine isn't. So there's multi-pronged vested interest in developing it.

Moreover, Servo aims to be embeddable (there are some working examples already), which is where other non-Chrome/ium browsers are failing (and Firefox too). Thanks to this it has much better chance at wider adoption and actually spawning multiple browsers.

> The thing with Servo is that it's highly modularized and some of its components are widely used by the larger Rust ecosystem, even it the whole browser engine isn't.

Alas not nearly as modularized as it could be. I think it's mainly just Stylo and WebRender (the components that got pulled into Firefox), and html5ever (the HTML parser) that are externally consumable.

Text and layout support are two things that could easily be ecosystem modules but aren't seemingly (from my perspective) because the ambition to be modular has been lost.

I've seen recent talk about swappable js engine, so I'm unsure about the ambition being lost. I'm eyeing Blitz too (actually tried to use it in one of my projects but the deps fucked me up).

Mozilla laid off the Servo team years ago.

Servo was passed onto Linux Foundation and is still being developed, some of its components are shared with Firefox.

Yet, after all these years its browser is quite frankly pre-historic.

What are you talking about? It doesn't have a "browser", it has a testing shell. For a time there was actual attempt with the Verso experiment but it got shelved just recently. Servo is working at being embeddable at the same time when Rust GUI toolkits are maturing. Once it gets embedding stabilized that will be the time for a full blown browser developement.

> It doesn't have a "browser", it has a testing shell.

So, yes it is still pre-historic.

> Once it gets embedding stabilized that will be the time for a full blown browser developement.

Servo development began in 2012. [0] 14 years later we get a v0.0.1.

At this point, Ladybird will likely reach 1.0 faster than Servo could, and the latter is not even remotely close to being usable even in 14 years of waiting.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servo_(software)

This is disingenuous. Servo is using RUST, language which grew together with it, pretty much, and all components surrounding it. C++ is how old, please remind me?

You could make almost any non-C non-C++ project good by that metric.

And no, they're not being disingenuous.

> At this point, Ladybird will likely reach 1.0 faster than Servo could, and the latter is not even remotely close to being usable even in 14 years of waiting.

When Servo is done, it's going to be a beast.

It's getting hundreds of commits per week:

https://github.com/servo/servo/graphs/commit-activity

It's by no means accurate, but the comparative histories of Ladybird vs. Servo sure has some parallels with Linux vs. GNU Hurd.

Servo's history is much more complicated and originally was planned to be used for the holo lens before the layoff. Comparing trajectory doesn't make sense they had completely different goals and directions.

Yes and yes. Firefox is partially written in Rust.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com