

Mozilla's New Multi-Core Browser and the Open Source Language That Powers It - steveklabnik
http://www.fastcolabs.com/3027664/under-the-hood-of-mozillas-new-multi-core-browser-and-the-open-source-language-that-powers-i

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pcwalton
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.)

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yetfeo
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...](https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mozilla.dev.servo/-dmlVwMknJk/BstzMVX5VR4J)

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mercurial
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.

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dman
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.

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w0utert
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.

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

The title is completely misleading, though.

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bjz_
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.

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tankenmate
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.

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

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

[http://www.meetup.com/Rust-Bay-
Area/events/143439552/](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...](https://air.mozilla.org/sprocketnes-practical-systems-programming-
in-rust/)

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

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notastartup
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?

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M2Ys4U
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)

