Discussion

Servo is now available on crates.io

diath: Too little too late now that the new meta is to use system provided webviews so you don't have to ship a big ass web renderer per app.

phaistra: Is there a table of implemented RFCs? Something similar to http://caniuse.com where we can see what HTML/JS/CSS standards and features are implemented? If it exists, I can't seem to find it. Closest thing seems to be "experimental features" page but its not quite detailed enough.

lastontheboat: https://doc.servo.org/apis.html is auto-generated from WebUDL interfaces that exist in Servo. It's not great but better than nothing.

that_lurker: Their bloghas monthly posts on changes https://servo.org/blog/

jszymborski: Closest is perhaps the web platform testshttps://servo.org/wpt/

bastawhiz: System web views were available as drag and drop components in VB6 two and a half decades ago. There's nothing "new" about that as a concept, and plenty of reasons to not want to use Blink/WebKit.

diath: > System web views were available as drag and drop components in VB6 two and a half decades ago. There's nothing "new" about that as a conceptWe are in a thread discussing a Rust library, logically, I was referring to the current approach in GUI rendering in the Rust space (such as Tauri and Dioxus).> and plenty of reasons to not want to use Blink/WebKit.Such as? Can you name a few objective reasons against Blink/WebKit (the technology) that does not involve just not liking Google/Apple?

phplovesong: Did firefox drop servo? I recalled they where in the progress of "rewrite in rust"?

airstrike: [delayed]

9fwfj9r: It's a great move. The early development of Rust aimed to support Servo. However, it's still disappointing that the script engine uses SpiderMonkey, which is purely C++.

drzaiusx11: It's best not to try and eat the elephant in one bite, which is perhaps where this project went wrong initially. Maybe this is a symptom of learning from past mistakes rather than a flaw.

saghm: My understanding is that the original intent of Servo was to be a way to develop features and port them over to Firefox itself (which did happen with at least a few features), and the relatively slower pace of developer is more due to Mozilla laying off everyone who was working on it. (Yes, presumably many of the same people are involved, but I would expect that being able to work on something full time without needing another source of income will end up making progress faster than needing to find time outside of work and balance between other things in life, ideally in a way that avoids burnout).

drzaiusx11: My understanding was that from day one the desire was to make a complete "web rendering & layout engine" and only pivoted to shipping smaller sub-components like Stylo (stylesheets) when it appeared to be "taking too long." I followed the project from the early days through the layoffs, but I may be misremembering things.

swiftcoder: No particular reason Servo couldn't one day become the system web view on Linux distros...

chrismorgan: Linux (GNU/Linux or whatever) doesn’t even have the concept of a system web view. In some environments you have some comparatively popular choice, like WebKitGTK, but it’s nothing like WebKit on macOS or WebView2 (or MSHTML in the past) on Windows.On my system (Arch, Sway), I do have webkitgtk-6.0 installed, but only because I manually installed epiphany (now called “GNOME Web”) because I wanted a decent proxy for testing Apple’s expensive browser (I have found webcompat-style Safari issues to be consistently reproducible in Epiphany).

apitman: > As you can see from the version number, this release is not a 1.0 release. In fact, we still haven’t finished discussing what 1.0 means for ServoWait, crate versions go up to 1.0?EDIT: Sorry, while crate stability may be an interesting conversation, this isn't the place for it. But I can't delete this comment. Please downvote it. Mods feel free to delete or demote it.

mort96: The fundamental problem with Rust versioning is that 0.3.5 is compatible with 0.3.6, but not 0.4.0 or 1.0.0; when major version is 0, the minor takes the role of major and patch takes the role of minor. So packages iterate through 0.x versions, and eventually, they reach a version that's "stable".If version 0.7 turned out to hit the right API and not require backward incompatible changes, releasing a version 1.0 would be as disruptive as a major version change to your users and communicate through version semantics that it is a breaking change.Semver declares that version 0.x is for initial development where there is no stability guarantee at all. This is the right semantics for a versioning system, but Cargo doesn't follow this part of semver. Providing stability guarantees throughout the 0.x cycle inevitably results in projects getting stuck in 0.x.This is one of my biggest gripes with Cargo. But Rust people seem to universally consider it a non-issue so I don't think it'll ever be fixed.

Starlevel004: The standard library has a whole bunch of tools to let them test and evolve APIs with a required-opt in, but every single ecosystem package has to get it right first try because Cargo will silently forcibly update packages and those evolution tools aren't available to third party packages.Such a stupid state of affairs.

swiftcoder: There are what, 5+ rust javascript engines that claim to be production-ready? Bolting one of those on in place of spider monkey seems like a reasonable future direction

mort96: What do you mean by "production ready" here exactly? In a web browser context, the JS engine is expected to have a high performance optimising JIT compiler. Do the existing Rust JS engines have that?

swiftcoder: I honestly don't know, but they do say "production ready" on their marketing pages, so...For an example of what I mean, see JetCrab: https://jetcrab.com

CryZe: This doesn't implement a JS engine, it's just a wrapper around boa.

andruby: Yes, during the layoff of August 2020Mozilla laid off the full Servo team, but never publicly announced this afaik. Wikipedia includes it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox#cite_ref-120

Sammi: Mozilla can't help it but be their own worst enemy. Ladybird may well never have happened if Mozilla just had kept working on Servo, and Ladybird is most definitely going to out compete Firefox when it reaches maturity, as Mozilla keeps on burning bridges with open source enthusiasts.

zarzavat: The problem with Mozilla is not just technical but cultural. The organization has been infected with managers. The managers want to keep their jobs more than they want Firefox to succeed. Clearly the solution is for the managers to fire themselves and allow the developers to run the show, but that was not going to happen.Ladybird, by contrast, is a developer-lead open source project that has no such constraints. They also don't have a product yet but I'm sure the picture will be radically different in a few years.Conway's law in action.

rafaelmn: This should be the real benchmark of AI coding skills - how fast do we get safe/modern infrastructure/tooling that everyone agrees we need but nobody can fund the development.If Anthropic wants marketing for Mythos without publishing it - show us servo contrib log or something like that. It aligns nicely with their fundamental infrastructure safety goals.I'd trust that way more than x% increase on y bench.Hire a core contributor on Servo or Rust, give him unlimited model access and let's see how far we get with each release.

mort96: We do not need vibe-coded critical infrastructure.

8NNTt8z3QvLT8tp: There's something to be said for the security benefits of not having a JIT though. Especially if you've used Rust for the engine you should have pretty solid security.

scrame: Unfortunately we're going to get it whether or not we need it.

simonw: Here's a vibe-coded "servo-shot" CLI tool which uses this crate to render an image of a web page: https://github.com/simonw/research/tree/main/servo-crate-exp... git clone https://github.com/simonw/research cd research/servo-crate-exploration/servo-shot cargo build ./target/debug/servo-shot https://news.ycombinator.com/ Here's the image it generated: https://gist.github.com/simonw/c2cb4fcb15b0837bbc4540c3d398c...

scrame: That's pretty cool. I'm guessing it would need some tweaking to handle things like cookies, or does it just need a pointer to the cookiejar? I'm not too familiar with servo,

falcor84: As I see it, the focus should not be about the coding, but about the testing, and particularly the security evaluation. Particularly for critical infrastructure, I would want us to have a testing approach that is so reliable that it wouldn't matter who/what wrote the code.

mort96: I disagree. Thorough testing provides some level of confidence that the code is correct, but there's immense value in having infrastructure which some people understand because they wrote it. No amount of process around your vibe slop can provide that.

px43: That's just status quo, which isn't really holding up in the modern era IMO.I'm sure we'll have vibed infrastructure and slow infrastructure, and one of them will burn down more frequently. Only time will tell who survives the onslaught and who gets dropped, but I personally won't be making any bets on slow infrastructure.

charcircuit: That is not the meta. The meta is to ship blink so you only have to support a single version of a single web engine in stead of many versions of many different web engines.

tracker1: I was a little curious to see if there was any Tauri integration, and it looks like there is (tauri-runtime-verso) ... Not sure where that comes out size-wise compared to Electron at that point though. My main desire there would be for Linux/flathub distribution of an app I've been working on.

givemeethekeys: So, since this is the top post on Hacker News, and the website's description is a bit too high level for me, what does Servo let me do? By "web technologies", does it mean "put a web browser inside your desktop app"?

caminanteblanco: It's an alternative browser engine, vis a vis Ladybird

swiftcoder: Specifically, it's the browser engine that spun out of Mozilla's early efforts towards a rust-based browser, and is one of the motivating projects for the entire Rust ecosystem