An Introduction to Servo [video] | Hacker News Reader

An Introduction to Servo [video]

air.mozilla.org

128 pointsadamnemecek33 comments

On of the announcements the Servo team makes here is that they want to take a component written in Rust within Servo (ie: image decoder) and bring that into the Gecko project.

Ambitious indeed! If that does happen, it would speak pretty well for Rust. Servo is a flagship project, but being able to demonstrate it can be successful in such a high profile piece of software (Gecko) would speak very well for the language.

Wow, the progress on this looks great. The layout/resize behavior looked at least 30fps, maybe 60fps, in any case, it looked like layout was substantially faster than either Blink or Gecko today.

Bear in mind that the more you implement of the HTML5/CSS specs the slower things get. But the feeling of the team (many of whom have experience on Gecko or Webkit) is that even with that taken into account the performance and power consumption improvements will still be significant. They have gained a great deal from all the experience with last generation of layout engines.

Even if the final performance gain was modest, I'd still take an engine which eliminates entire classes of security issues over one which doesn't.

Agreed. And the fact that some of the components could be incrementally incorporated back to Gecko as libraries would also be a big win for the security of Firefox, even if the possibility of using Servo in its entirety is a long way off (if it ever happens).

I have been saying that about programming languages since the early 90's, but we needed to have connected software everywhere for people to start paying attention.

Did anybody else notice the little Samsung logo at the top right corner of the slides? I wonder what's up with that.

They are collaborating with Mozilla on this project https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2013/04/03/mozilla-and-samsung...

Samsung are the second biggest contributor to Servo. Something about WebKit being an Apple project possibly?

    >Something about WebKit being an Apple project possibly?

The little conspiracy trolls are bouncing around in my skull, I rarely let them out, but they currently have me wondering if Samsung is planning for the possibility of an Amazon-esque Android fork in the future sans Chrome?

I think quite a few large companies would love to see an Android fork without Google. Unfortunately ditching the Play Store is not as easy as it sounds.

Samsung has a counterpart for pretty much every notable app Google has to offer on Android, investing in Servo may be a part of this.

If that's the case then we might see a production release sooner than later. Not from Mozilla, but something Samsung releases - perhaps an embedded browser component in some app.

It's a slide deck template I've been using for some joint Mozilla/Samsung presentations lately (LinuxCon NA, EU). The logo tabs are a cute way of indicating when the talk switches between a Mozilla and Samsung speaker.

Darn wish this was on Youtube, I just love casting the direct stream (not tab) of tech presentations on my 50". The sound is awfully low, will have to download and boost the audio via sox since I'm interested in hearing how Servo performs under Rust at this early stage.

So ChromeCast does not support HTML5 video? That's a bit sad.

It actually does, if you open it in Chrome on Android and make the video full screen, a Chromecast icon will appear top left.

I believe Firefox on Android supports this now too, though not tried it myself.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/use-firefox-android-sen...

On Firefox for Android Beta, https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.fi... the feature has yet to go to release.

There are download links for webm and mp4, fwiw.

Dude there are direct links to both WebM and Mp4 copies of the video and you want to watch it on Youtube? They have assimilated you already, need your daily dose of ads?

If you have a Roku there is an Air Mozilla channel. Direct link to the channel https://owner.roku.com/add/VMFAG and details about what has been tested at https://air.mozilla.org/roku/

There is a version with enhanced audio at https://air.mozilla.org/an-introduction-to-servo-2/

A textual description would help, so that one could decide if watching some talking head was worth it.

It's Mozilla's experimental layout engine written in Rust. It's currently the Rust "flagship project".

Outside of the compiler, which is itself written in Rust.

A compiler written in itself only proves that a language is good for writing compilers. A browser engine on the other hand touches huge swathes of the big problems faced in computer science, and puts severe demands on a language in terms aiding the production of fast, concurrent, and safe code that can be maintained at scale.

It doesn't quite prove that it's good for writing compilers, merely that it can be used for writing compilers.

Ah yes. Correct.

It's still a fair amount of code, and means dealing with less CS-y things but still practical things like command-line arguments, data structures, file handling...

To be fair, commandline arguments and file handling fall under the heading of "things that get your language get eliminated from ever being taken seriously if they're not straightforward to do". Data structures... how do you figure they're "less CS-y things"?

I'll blame the lack of tea. Data structures are quite CS-y. The point is, you have enough complexity in a compiler to find out a number of weaknesses in your language if you self-host, even if it doesn't cover everything.

Lars Bergstrom (works on the Servo team) gives a brief overview of Servo, its motivation and its (good!) performance. He also gives a few pointers on how someone can get started contributing.

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