Rust-Written "Stylo" Servo Style System Now Available Via Firefox Nightly

[lkundrak]

Supposed to be a huge upgrade, years and years of development with very little publicly visible progress, people talking about how it's a stupid solution and when it's finally added, but have to put in extra effort to activate it. The only thing that's missing is the Mozilla people canceling it before it's made standard.

what are you even talking about

[FishPls]

Supposed to be a huge upgrade, years and years of development with very little publicly visible progress, people talking about how it's a stupid solution and when it's finally added, but have to put in extra effort to activate it. The only thing that's missing is the Mozilla people canceling it before it's made standard.

The Rust Style system wasn't even made by the Firefox style people in the first place, so it's not like they pulled people out to work on it. It's created by the people working on Servo, which is a research project. In later times as they started the Firefox integration, some Firefox developers started contributing as well, but for the most part this was born out of research work and didn't really steal away time from the Firefox devs.

[mastercoms]

What they are doing is actually pretty smart. They're gradually introducing features with a new technology where it makes the most sense first, so they can iterate upon future components based on what they've learned from past experiments.

Anyway, as for the actual setting, Firefox feels really snappy and fast! It is actually amazing how quickly it can show pages completely now.

[kaprikawn]

So what is the situation with this on anything non-x86?

I'm guessing you'd have to cross-compile to get it on something like ARM? And I believe at least Debian has a policy of only compiling on native hardware so if you want it on that you're SOL or stuck cross-compiling it yourself?

Is that a fair assessment?

I don't necessarily have a problem with them pushing boundaries, but I'd like to see Rust on a wider variety of platforms.

[mmstick]

Supposed to be a huge upgrade, years and years of development with very little publicly visible progress, people talking about how it's a stupid solution and when it's finally added, but have to put in extra effort to activate it. The only thing that's missing is the Mozilla people canceling it before it's made standard.

Uhhhhhhhhhh, sorry what? Rust has made extremely visible, regularly-updated progress. They are rabid with community updates and blog posts. Rust itself is seeing major adoption rates. Servo has a similar story. And a number of other Rust-based projects like RedoxOS carry the same behaviors of regularly posting updates in a user-friendly, highly visible manner. So much for 'very little publicly visible progress'. And the entire point of this article is proof that progress is moving along precisely as Mozilla had previously predicted last year when they laid out the plans for Project Quantum. Exchanging the Gecko engine for Servo mid-flight is a major feat, and they are succeeding in doing so. Both WebRender and Stylo are now integrated into Firefox, Stylo is ready to use today, and WebRender may be ready within a few months. Stylo by itself has already drastically improved page load times, and Rust has enabled Firefox to close a number of CVEs and other bugs that would have been difficult to track down with C++.

[mmstick]

So what is the situation with this on anything non-x86?

I'm guessing you'd have to cross-compile to get it on something like ARM? And I believe at least Debian has a policy of only compiling on native hardware so if you want it on that you're SOL or stuck cross-compiling it yourself?

Is that a fair assessment?

I don't necessarily have a problem with them pushing boundaries, but I'd like to see Rust on a wider variety of platforms.

No, it's not a fair assessment. Not sure where you get the idea that compiling is limited to x86 architectures only. You can actually compile Rust and compile Rust software on Android + ARM, so, yeah, there's wider platform support.

[ua=42]

Cool. It will be nice when this is available (and enabled) in stable.

[polarathene]

Supposed to be a huge upgrade, years and years of development with very little publicly visible progress, people talking about how it's a stupid solution and when it's finally added, but have to put in extra effort to activate it. The only thing that's missing is the Mozilla people canceling it before it's made standard.

Servo is going to take years from what the devs had said. They're just adding incremental upgrades to firefox as that progresses and firefox is capable of utilizing Rust for things. It's resolved a bunch of bugs and improved performance prior to this discussed feature(that is under a flag for user to enable atm yes, but will be default in the near future far as I can tell). It has plenty of public visible progress? They blog about it, they're working on a marketing push for v57 release, public github repo, etc. No idea what you're on about.

I read an article today that covered performance of startup and memory from FF v20 to v56 and at v55 there is a significant improvement. The nightly with this feature enabled makes it even better apparently It's about time!

[necrophcodr]

Supposed to be a huge upgrade, years and years of development with very little publicly visible progress, people talking about how it's a stupid solution and when it's finally added, but have to put in extra effort to activate it. The only thing that's missing is the Mozilla people canceling it before it's made standard.

Are you okay? It's not a HUGE UPGRADE. This is a development thing, and isn't active in stable builds. When it's ready, you won't even know that it's on, and you won't have to do a thing.

[duby229]

So what is the situation with this on anything non-x86?

I'm guessing you'd have to cross-compile to get it on something like ARM? And I believe at least Debian has a policy of only compiling on native hardware so if you want it on that you're SOL or stuck cross-compiling it yourself?

Is that a fair assessment?

I don't necessarily have a problem with them pushing boundaries, but I'd like to see Rust on a wider variety of platforms.

Rust actually uses LLVM to compile machine code, so whatever platforms LLVM can compile to should at least theoretically work.