Hacker News Reader

Comment by higherpurpose | Hacker News Reader

> Mozilla on how its Servo engine will throw away the 20th-century baggage that holds back current browsers and harness the power of modern multi-core smartphones and tablets.

Then I hope they don't intend on supporting any 32-bit platform. Make a clean start on 64-bit platforms. By the time Servo is out, there should be 64-bit ARM processors cheap enough even for their low-end phones, and on a desktop it should be a nobrainer.

View on HN

It's too soon surely. There are plenty of recent or current 64-bit-incapable platforms (PCs running 32-bit Windows, every Android phone to date ...) which you'd hope to at least be able to run an up-to-date web browser on for several years to come.

As a matter of fact, Servo was broken in 32-bit for quite some time, although it isn't at the moment.

No, it's definitely still broken on 32bit platforms. It does not even finish building right now.

Doesn't it build on Android, which is 32-bit?

Maybe he meant x86 as opposed to ARM(32 bit)?

Correct.

From what I remember from the Rust/Servo ML they intend to pursue 64 bit as default and 32 as a legacy option.

There's no particular reason to not support 32 bit, at least so far.

Would it be that difficult to just queue up those threads on a single 32 bit processor instead of sending them off to separate cores?

It wouldn't be optimal, but at least they wouldn't have to completely write off older or lower-powered devices.

Distributing threads and processes across available cores is the job of the OS, not the application.

In Rust, (right now) you can choose between a 1:1 or a N:M mapping between OS threads and Rust tasks. With N:M threading, the runtime necessarily does (some of) that internally.

Incidentally, Servo uses both: we use 1:1 for the parallel layout worker threads and M:N for the script and layout tasks.

> Then I hope they don't intend on supporting any 32-bit platform.

this type of thinking is so negative... why would you ever make not supporting/doing something to be a project's goal?

the servo devs might make speed of development or maintainability a goal, and that might lead to the decision not to support 32-bit (it's not clear to me why it would create that much overhead on either front, but then i don't know rust).

sorry if that's tangential, but reasoning/explanations of the form, "here's the goal: let's not accomplish __," is broken, and i just needed to vent.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com