Mozilla's New Multi-Core Browser and the Open Source Language That Powers It | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla's New Multi-Core Browser and the Open Source Language That Powers It

fastcolabs.com

104 pointssteveklabnik17 comments

Cross-posted from Reddit:

"Servo is a successor to Firefox" isn't really accurate. It's a research browser engine, not a production browser, and there are no productization plans at this time. (That said, we're aiming for the same engineering quality of a product—"research" isn't an excuse to cut corners.)

It might not be a goal for Mozilla for it to be a production browser but it does seem to be for other people working on it and this is affecting what is being worked on:

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mozilla.dev.servo/-dmlVwMknJ...

I'd like to point out the significant between "browser engine" (HTML/CSS/rendering, eg WebKit) and "browser", which relies on a rendering engine but encompasses a lot more functionalities. Servo, as far as I know, is the former, presenting it as a "browser" (even if only at an experimental level) is misleading.

If you produce a top-notch browser engine that makes great use of multiple threads in a safe way, why on earth wouldn't you productise it?

The title of the article is - "Under The Hood Of Mozilla's New Multi-Core Browser And The Open Source Language That Powers It". The article doesnt live upto that title since it contains no code and no technical commentary.

Agreed, the whole article can be summarized as 'Mozilla is working on a new browser engine made for multi-core systems, in a new language they are developing called 'Rust' which is made for speed and safety'. Not much more to learn from it.

It has some interesting details on how Mozilla manages the Rust community.

The title is completely misleading, though.

The article was rather meandering in its focus, but other programming language projects can certainly learn a great deal from Rust in respect to community management and marketing. Mozilla is not just building a language, it is growing a community. It doesn't matter how well designed your language is – if it doesn't have a strong community or people have no idea it exists, then it will inevitably die and be forgotten.

Jolly good, I read the first paragraph and thought "Is this piece just fluff?" [Check comments, yep]. Time saved.

You'll need a multi-core (sic) browser to view fastcolabs's website; it just chews CPU for very little benefit that I can see, a total pain on a laptop.

Anyone have more details on what this means? "The Skylight service also uses Rust to implement its Ruby on Rails application monitor,"

Tilde, the company started by Yehuda Katz and Tom Dale of Ember fame, is building a product called Skylight. You can roughly think of it as a New Relic competitor.

It uses a Ruby extension written in Rust to collect the performance data.

For more details, check out this video from the Bay Area Rust Meetup: https://air.mozilla.org/sprocketnes-practical-systems-progra...

It was talked about in our first SF Bay Area rust meeetup:

http://www.meetup.com/Rust-Bay-Area/events/143439552/

If I recall correctly, Skylight hooks into the ruby interpreter to do real time performance monitoring for Rails apps. They felt they couldn't get the performance they needed out of pure ruby, and felt that writing their hooks in Rust would be safer than in C. You can see Yehuda's presentation here. It's about an hour and 10 minutes in:

https://air.mozilla.org/sprocketnes-practical-systems-progra...

It wasn't just performance, it was also memory usage and GC pauses.

what I'd love to see is something like node-webkit, a thin layer browser client, but utilizing Mozilla under the hood.

I mean if Unreal Engine 4 runs on it, why aren't we using it to drive all software?

IIRC, Servo implements the WebKit embedding API, so it wouldn't be too far-fetched to have a node-servo (although Mozilla are using Spidermonkey and not V8 as the JS engine)

dont bother, look what happened to XUL, or gecko powered node.

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