This month in Servo: console logging, parallel tables, OpenXR, and more | Hacker News Reader

This month in Servo: console logging, parallel tables, OpenXR, and more

servo.org

138 pointsinfotainment26 comments

It would be nice if servo would implement CSS paged media for generating PDFs. This would be a niche with almost no competition.

Indeed. Prince¹ is good but not free and doesn't support CSS grid.

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_%28software%29

The most important thing about open source projects is the people, and I'm sad to know of Alan Jeffrey's passing.

RIP.

This is interesting. I've talked about this with several people in the past. For some, the people are more important (like with a singer), and for some the thing is more important (the song). I'm struggling with this for several decades now, because I never was a fan (the closest fan thing I did in 45 years, was reading a GnR biography, otherwise I was never interested in the life of a singer/band, Bowie was in Berlin, ah interesting, coming back to his songs...). Same for open source projects. Linus or Linux? Antirez or Redis?

(Not diminish the work of any open source contributor or creator, or the person)

Same for me, though I think it may also depend on where you grew up, for example in the USA celebrity culture is much more of a thing than in Germany

You are missing the point.

A project lives and dies by the people actually doing the work, especially an open source one. That’s what is meant by the most important part is the people. That’s true independently of the quality of what is actually achieved (that being said great team tends to produce great products).

So Python is dead because van Rossum stepped down?

Last time I checked van Rossum wasn’t the sole contributor of Python, so, no, obviously. Your point being?

Sorry, your thoughts are too random to me.

It would be interesting to compare development speed of Servo and ladybird. One is done in Rust, the other in modern C++.

At least to an outsider like me it seems ladybird is moving much faster, although this could be due to reasons unrelated to the programming language.

At least for servo, it started as a research project. I imagine a lot of time was spent trying out ideas for WebRender or parallel CSS (two parts that made it into Firefox).

I also assume starting a browser i easier than finishing a browser but I can't speak to where either is at on the difficut-to-finish spectrum.

Ladybird is a browser, servo is a rendering engine. They have different aims. Some of Servo's components are developed by Mozilla for the use in Firefox. The first serious implementation of browser using Servo started very recently in the form of Verso.

Is ladybird not using a custom rendering engine too? Or you mean they're following existing techniques more whereas servo is focused on research over production?

One of Servo's aims is to make an embeddable rendering engine; an alternative to chromium. Chrome/ium is not just a browser it powers everything nowadays, apps, all major alternative browsers run chromium underneath. And that's a huge problem.

Yeah but I thought the last comment was saying that Ladybird was developing faster than Servo. Does the embedding API add that much dev time?

The ecosystem of Servo is very very different. It's very modular and many components are fast moving targets developed by multiple companies. While with ladybird it's a comparatively singular thing (developed mostly by a single guy). The embedding is a serious and ambitious effort and possibly one of the reasons why Mozilla dropped it. It has to support vast array of ecosystems and compete with a very mature and widespread electron/chromium to cover the same use cases. It's a massive effort, but is already being experimentaly integrated by companies (like embedding into Qt toolkit).

And to simply put, Servo has a much larger scope, their aim is much wider than making a browser. The browser will be one of its use cases (It's already being developed intensely in the form of Verso by different team).

And verso is moving very, very fast.

I just hope that servo starts to move a little faster too. It's in serious need of funding.

shout out to m_sub_2 who has been getting WebXR up and running ....

https://x.com/msub2official/status/1818533316477251669

That's really cool. Any more information about how this could be used?

It's more interesting to expand client options for WebXR/Immersive which was narrowed down to Meta/Oculus browser untill A) Wolvic from Igalia who took over the abandoned Firefox Reality browser and B) Apple finally got it some of it into some Safari devices. If you believe the web and information consumption in general will become more 3D over time like me then it is a capacity building step in the right direction at least. Sorry for the late reply btw lol.

My understanding was that Mozilla scrapped Servo. What’s the plan/scope for this project now that it’s being developed outside of Mozilla?

To develop the engine?

> Servo is a web rendering engine written in Rust, with WebGL and WebGPU support, and adaptable to desktop, mobile, and embedded applications.

Mozilla didn't "scrap" it (it was an open source project from the start, so they coulnd't have scrapped the project even if they wanted to), but they laid off the Servo developers in 2020. The project moved to the Linux Foundation and then apparently languished for several years, but at the end of 2022 (https://servo.org/blog/2023/01/16/servo-2023/) it was picked up by Igalia, and since then it has made considerable progress again. This presentation has a lot of details: https://servo.org/slides/2024-04-16-seattle-rust-user-group/

I think the big motivation is now "embedding", i.e. using servo as replacement for webview/cef/etc. So for example you could think Tauri+Servo as Rusts answer to Nodejs+Chromium in Electron.

https://servo.org/blog/2024/01/19/embedding-update/

Another example would be Qt which normally uses Chromium for webviews but now there has been work to use Servo instead: https://www.kdab.com/embedding-servo-in-qt/

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