The Servo Browser Engine Has Been Making Great Progress In 2023

[phoronix]

Phoronix: The Servo Browser Engine Has Been Making Great Progress In 2023

The Servo browser engine has been seeing renewed development activity and interest since it was transferred to the Linux Foundation Europe and has attracted contributions from the likes of the Igalia consulting firm. Last week at the Open Source Summit Europe, an update on Servo was presented...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Servo-2023-Progress

[chromer]

Is there any chance for Servo to be a standalone browser? (apart from Firefox)

[juxuanu]

Hopefully one day we can use this in programs created with GTK/Qt and start toying with a replacement to WebKit

[Weasel]

With the use of the Rust programming language for memory safety and focusing development on modern web standards, Servo has a lot of potential in the future for use within embedded contexts.

Actually that's exactly what it would prevent it from being popular for embedding, lmfao.

[bug77]

Actually that's exactly what it would prevent it from being popular for embedding, lmfao.

How do you figure?

[Weasel]

How do you figure?

Because it needs Rust? Despite what shills like Michael say, most projects and most people don't use Rust.

[bug77]

Because it needs Rust? Despite what shills like Michael say, most projects and most people don't use Rust.

Why would you need Rust to call into a Rust compiled layout engine? Firefox calls into Servo and Firefox is not written in Rust.

[Flaburgan]

Because it needs Rust? Despite what shills like Michael say, most projects and most people don't use Rust.

Once compiled it will just be a binary. And hopefully a small and efficient one. I would love Servo to replace Webkit in electron for example. All my software are electron now, even if I don't like it... Visual Code / Atom, Docker Desktop, Signal, Mattermost, Spotify... I think Thunderbird and Firefox are only two left that I use on a daily basis and are not electron.

[Ananace]

Because it needs Rust? Despite what shills like Michael say, most projects and most people don't use Rust.

Rust has direct support for exposing a plain C ABI from the code, so it can be equally as embeddable as anything written in plain C - which is basically the gold standard for interoperability.
One could argue about WASM, but since Rust compiles to that as well it's really not much of an argument.

[Tobu]

The slides on the conference website are hard to read (they're png in a pdf), there's a better version here

https://servo.org/slides/2023-09-21-open-source-summit-europe/