Mozilla's Servo Engine Now Capable Of Rendering GitHub Near Flawlessly

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Mozilla's Servo Engine Now Capable Of Rendering GitHub Near Flawlessly

Mozilla's Servo next-generation layout engine is now nearly spot-on with its rendering of the GitHub.com web-site...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Mozilla-Servo-GitHub

[Emdek]

Finally more progress for cure to WebKit/Blink mono culture.
Now I just need Qt bindings for it. ;-)

[VanCoding]

Are there any benchmarks of it rendering the GitHub page compared to Gecko/WebKit? That would be very interesting.

[bug77]

What kind of an alpha release will this be? Is it about an alpha build of FF including Servo or is it about making some alpha packages available for whoever is interested in playing with them?

[iq-0]

What kind of an alpha release will this be? Is it about an alpha build of FF including Servo or is it about making some alpha packages available for whoever is interested in playing with them?

It certainly wouldn't be the first. That is possibly never going to happen (expect more of a Internet Explorer -> Edge like thing, with both of them coexisting for some time).

I recall reading something about the enging being good enough for dogfeeding (that the devs should be able to use it for all their dev-related needs (github, bugzilla, ...)) and embedding API completeness.

[lunarcloud]

Now I just need Qt bindings for it. ;-)

Apparently mixing rust and Qt is possible but not great, just due to incompatibility inherent between the way they each do something.

http://endl.ch/content/cxx2rust-pains-wrapping-c-rust-example-qt5

[ssokolow]

Apparently mixing rust and Qt is possible but not great, just due to incompatibility inherent between the way they each do something.
http://endl.ch/content/cxx2rust-pain...st-example-qt5

Actually, it wouldn't be that difficult.

Calling C++ code from non-C++ code (eg. Using Qt in a non-C++ language) is a major pain if you haven't had time to write something like the SIP tool PyQt uses to automate the generation of a wrapper. (Each C++ compiler has its own ABI and it may change from version to version. To bind to C++ code, you need to write more C++ code which exposes a C ABI.) It's also complicated to make Qt's internal reference counting subservient to Rust's borrow checker.

Calling Rust code from non-Rust code still has the "You have to use Rust's equivalent to 'extern C' to expose a C ABI" part of that, but embedding a Rust library in a C or C++ project is much simpler (Firefox already has support for using Servo's URL and MP4 parsers).

Also, this is a special case. They're already building a CEF-compatible ABI wrapper for Servo and writing a wrapper around CEF to add Qt-isms like signals and slots should be simple.

[magika]

So can it open pages without crashing yet?

[Michael_S]

It certainly wouldn't be the first. That is possibly never going to happen (expect more of a Internet Explorer -> Edge like thing, with both of them coexisting for some time).

I think that makes sense because Firefox currently has an image problem. In my extended social circle, there are the tech novices that use their default browser (usually Internet Explorer), and almost everyone else uses Chrome. They all switched in the 2008-2012 time frame when Chrome did have a huge edge over Firefox, and I can't interest anyone in giving Firefox another look. I've been trying.

I suspect that once the bugs are hammered out of the Electrolysis project, the original Firefox will be as good or better than Chrome by every metric. Right now I think it's close on Windows, but further behind on Linux. I get periodic hangs with 100% CPU use for a few seconds for Firefox on Linux - never on Windows - despite running with no add-ons or plugins of any kind.

[caligula]

Too bad Rust's type system isn't powerful enough. Higher kinded types would be nice. Otherwise it's just a waste of time investing your time on it.

https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/issues/324