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Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

Here's a vibe-coded "servo-shot" CLI tool which uses this crate to render an image of a web page: https://github.com/simonw/research/tree/main/servo-crate-exp...

  git clone https://github.com/simonw/research
  cd research/servo-crate-exploration/servo-shot
  cargo build
  ./target/debug/servo-shot https://news.ycombinator.com/

Here's the image it generated: https://gist.github.com/simonw/c2cb4fcb15b0837bbc4540c3d398c...

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Cool! I checked the source and noticed that even LLM prefers simplified, high level Rust coding styles: use value types such as String, use smart pointers such as reference counting, clone liberally, etc… instead of fighting the borrow checker gatekeepers.

It is the style I prefer to use Rust for. Coming from Python, Typescript and even Java, even with this high level Rust, it yields incredible improvement already.

> Cool! I checked the source and noticed that even LLM prefers simplified, high level Rust coding styles: use value types such as String, use smart pointers such as reference counting, clone liberally, etc… instead of fighting the borrow checker gatekeepers.

Yeah that tracks because the AI is dumb as a bag of bricks. It can apply patterns off stackoverflow, but can hardly understand the borrow checker.

This is super useful! I have immediate use for this.

Do you know if Servo is 100% Rust with no external system dependencies? (ie, can get away with rustls only?)

Can this do Javascript? (Edit: Rendering SPAs / Javascript-only UX would be useful.)

Edit 2: Can it do WebGL? Same rationale for ThreeJS-style apps and 3D renders. (This in particular is right up my use case's alley.)

It depends on stuff like SpiderMonkey so not pure Rust.

It should be able to render JavaScript but I've seen it throw bugs on simple pages, no doubt because my vibe-coded thing is crap not because Servo itself can't handle them.

I have been building/vibecoding a similar tool and unfortunately came to the conclusion that in practice, there are just too many features dependent on the full Chrome stack that it's just more pragmatic to use a real Chromium installation despite the file size. Performance/image generation speed is still fine, though.

In Rust, the chromiumoxide crate is a performant way to interface with it for screenshots: https://crates.io/crates/chromiumoxide

I think you could in theory have a similar webkit-based stripped down headless crate that might have a good tradeoff of features, performance, and size.

> there are just too many features dependent on the full Chrome stack

Do you mind elaborating on what features are missing?

Servo does execute JS and does support webgl (and some but not all of webgl2 if you enable the feature: https://book.servo.org/design-documentation/experimental-fea...).

That's pretty cool. I'm guessing it would need some tweaking to handle things like cookies, or does it just need a pointer to the cookiejar? I'm not too familiar with servo,

It's a VERY simple initial demo, I expect things like cookies would require quite a lot more work.

I wonder why most of the "g" characters are cropped.

good catch

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