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Comment by nicoburns | Hacker News Reader

> this is the first time I hear about Blitz. Looks equally interesting and ambitious. It is probably the real undercover web engine

It's certainly a newer and lesser-known engine. It's mostly been me working on it for the past year or so (with a couple of other occasional contributors). But I do have funding to work on it full time through DioxusLabs (who are building Dioxus Native - a Flutter / React Native competitor on top of it) and NLnet (who are a non-profit interested in the alternative web browser use case).

We're trying to really push on the modular side of things to create a web engine that's flexible / hackable and can be moulded for a variety of use cases.

We'd love more contributors, so if anyone is interested in getting involved then drop by our GitHub (https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz/) or Discord (https://discord.gg/AnNPqT95pu - #native channel)

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You have my admiration and support for this work! I guess it goes without saying how monumental and critical the work on alternative engines like servo and libweb are. We are genuinely tired of the current duopoly (I'm starting to lose hope with Firefox and gecko as well. They seem to have priorities different to our expectations.) But I guess we now have one more to look forward to, thanks to you and the rest of the team! Personally, I hope to pitch in as soon as I have some spare time available. Regards!

> You have my admiration and support for this work!

Thanks!

> Personally, I hope to pitch in as soon as I have some spare time available.

Amazing - maybe see you around :)

Just skimmed through the Blitz source. Really interesting. I don’t have experience with UI rendering or Rust, but I couldn’t help wondering: if you leave out things like local storage and websockets, why include networking at all? Feels like a separate concern. Genuinely curious. Great project. Wishing you all the best!

Gotta fetch images and stylesheets from the network!

We do have the networking abstracted behind a trait (so people can bring their own implementation if they want), but we need something for testing (and it's convenient for users if we provide a default option for them too). I would also note that our networking support is a pretty thin layer (~200 LoC) around the https://docs.rs/reqwest/ crate. As well as HTTP, reqwest is handling things like cookies and form encoding for us.

> or Discord

Oh, no, why do alternative web browser engine devs love Discord so much? The Ladybird project also does this… that's certainly a barrier to entry for would be contributors attached to free software and software freedom… It's a shame, I suspect the intersection between people like this and people interested in alternative web browser engines is not small (comparatively speaking)…

Anyway, it's nice to see alternative web browser engines appearing like this. We need browser tech that does not rely on Big Ad funding. Even better if they cooperate on some common libraries like this.

Thanks for working on such things.

Web browser engines have always interested me, I might one day jump in.

Ironically the rationale for using Discord is that people are more likely to join it! It may be a case that this depend on the community one is targeting. Discord is popular among Rust developers, but perhaps less so among browser developers. If Zulip is more acceptable to you, then I also hang out in the Linebender Zulip [0]

Linebender [1] is an open source collective whose 2D renderer (Vello [2]) and text layout library (Parley [3]) we have adopted (and are actively contributing back to) as another part of our "make everything modular" strategy in Blitz.

[0]: https://xi.zulipchat.com/ [1]: https://github.com/linebender [2]: https://github.com/linebender/vello [3]: https://github.com/linebender/parley

> Ironically the rationale for using Discord is that people are more likely to join it!

Everybody says this, this ends up being a self-fulfilling prophecy :-)

I guess it's difficult to avoid if the whole rust community is on it (which I didn't know, that's quite bad news for me xD)

> Linebender [1] is an open source collective whose 2D renderer (Vello [2]) and text layout library (Parley [3]) we have adopted (and are actively contributing back to) as another part of our "make everything modular" strategy in Blitz.

You keep on mentioning cool stuff you are working on!

I'll be sure to check these things out. I wouldn't mind installing Zulip (actually, I'm quite interested in trying it at some point) should I start working on these stuff one day.

Thanks again!

> I guess it's difficult to avoid if the whole rust community is on it (which I didn't know, that's quite bad news for me xD)

The actual compiler development is also on Zulip (https://rust-lang.zulipchat.com/). And I still consider the /r/rust subreddit the real hub of the rust community in genreal. But I'm about 20 different Discord servers for various specific Rust projects (help!).

> I wouldn't mind installing Zulip (actually, I'm quite interested in trying it at some point) should I start working on these stuff one day.

A quick mention that you don't actually need to install Zulip: you can just use the web version, although you probably do want the app on mobile (the desktop version is just a wrapper of the website, but the mobile app is Flutter-based).

(also true of Discord, although it remains less free and open)

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