I hope the Servo team is acquainted with the video game world, and the curious optimizations that have been taken in that realm to greatly improve performance in multi-threaded settings.
I hope the Servo team is acquainted with the video game world, and the curious optimizations that have been taken in that realm to greatly improve performance in multi-threaded settings.
I'm not affiliated with Mozilla or Servo but from the information on the Servo page and the number of Acid2 and other issues they're tracking, it's clear that there's still plenty of work to do. Throw in the fact that the Rust language itself is targeting the end of the year before they hit version 1.0 and you'd have to guess that Servo as a separate project likely has minimum 6 months (more likely a year) before they examine whether it's successful enough to start integrating with Firefox.
Then they'd need to integrate and test.
Think about how long the new "Australis" UI was in development (more than 2 years). It was just a user-interface change without changing programming language or other dev-tools.
The renderer is the core of the program. And integrating Servo would involve integrating and testing a new language along with the new code. I doubt a large, capable team could perform that much integration and testing in under 12 months – even after Servo itself was considered "complete" (which it isn't).
My prediction: a release of Firefox with Servo code is 2 years away or more (assuming Servo is considered a "success" in 6-12 months).
I'm not sure if that's still the plan, however.
I think the biggest improvements may come from experimenting with new asynchronous DOM APIs, which the browser can intelligently batch up for performance. Unfortunately, web developers will have to use these APIs for them to have any effect, and it seems to be a long way away right now for real world use. But it's part of what Servo will be helping to explore, as I understand it.