

An Introduction to Servo [video] - adamnemecek
https://air.mozilla.org/an-introduction-to-servo/

======
d4mi3n
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.

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cromwellian
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.

~~~
bjz_
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.

~~~
mercurial
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.

~~~
bjz_
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).

------
jbigelow76
Did anybody else notice the little Samsung logo at the top right corner of the
slides? I wonder what's up with that.

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

~~~
jbigelow76

        >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?

~~~
joelthelion
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.

------
joshbaptiste
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.

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

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

~~~
ZeroGravitas
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...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/use-firefox-android-send-videos-
chromecast)

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

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

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

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

~~~
bjz_
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.

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

~~~
bjz_
Ah yes. Correct.

~~~
mercurial
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...

~~~
pdpi
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"?

~~~
mercurial
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.

