Hacker News Reader

Comment by panic | Hacker News Reader

Network stacks and web browsers are easier to improve incrementally than more fundamental parts of the OS.

I'm not so sure. When you implement your own OS your hands are mostly free. With browser on the other hand, you have to comply to large, complex and evolving standards (HTML/CSS/Javascript). I might be biased by the fact that I dabbled a bit with the Linux kernel and dislike graphics programming, though.

Why is he being downvoted?

That's true. Take the Redox project that's been moving along nicely. Or Haiku, Syllable, MenuetOS, etc. All of them had small teams with external vontributors that got plenty done in terms of a usable OS.

Whereas, a fast, standardized browser like Firefox takes a huge company to support it. The complexity is just huge. Plus, the standards and web experience are always moving along. Can't wait for more people to scratch an itch if you want to stay competitive.

Browser engines like WebKit are (with some work) portable to any platform with a C++ compiler: that's how the current Haiku browser is built.

So, now you just need to build a highly-optimizing, C++ compiler instead of a browser? That's another project that few got right over a period of a decade or so. Of course, one could use a C++ to C compiler or extend existing C++ compiler with OS-specific backend. Might still be plenty work but easier than clean-slate browser.

Both gcc and clang have flags to emit raw object files. At which point, your porting work really centers around making sure you have a good standard library in place, and that your kernel has a reasonable implementation of parsing a binary format like ELF or PE, etc.

Now that's pretty cool. Appreciate the tip.

> So, now you just need to build a highly-optimizing, C++ compiler instead of a browser?

No. You just use gcc. Like everyone else.

The gist of the comment was whether GCC automatically made something like WebKit + JIT + Native Client work on very, different OS by a simple compile. I doubted that was true or that the work was easy.

You only need to implement the window system and widget rendering glue. The layout, javascript, CSS, DOM, history, etc is all platform independent.

But implementing `drawButton()`, `blitToScreen()` and similar is in no way similar to implementing a C++ compiler, as you implied.

An example of a port is here, in this directory: https://trac.webkit.org/browser/trunk/Source/WebCore/platfor...

Sounds a lot better than I thought. Appreciate the explanation. :)

I ran firefox on BeOS.

Im curious how it ran. Was there a performance boost from BeOS architecture?

Not noticeably. It just rendered better than the built in browser..

I prefer clang.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com