Mozilla's Servo Begins Firming Up 2017 Goals

[Djhg2000]

I don't know why we're talking about programming languages, but C is a beautiful language. It's also wildly misunderstood by kids who first learned modern languages and are convinced that if their code compiles it should work. Pure C requires you to think and understand how a processor works. No way around it and there shouldn't be for a low level language.

[uid313]

Firefox still does not run on Wayland.
input fields of type date, time and datetime are still not supported.

[nomadewolf]

They keep changing their minds about what Servo means for Firefox. The latest is that they will chop off parts of it and shove it into their new-new rendering engine called Quantum or something. Which seems like an odd way to go about things but what do I know.

Looking at the Wiki page

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Quantum

what it looks like is that they're calling the process of merging Servo into Firefox 'Quantum'.
Other than that, they say that they intend to do it in phases, as Servo's components matures.
Makes sense, to me at least.

[bug77]

Firefox still does not run on Wayland.

Fwiw, this is not because Firefox has a dependency on X. It has a dependency on GTK2, which is robably what doesn't work with Wayland. As soon as that's gone, the problem should be solved.

input fields of type date, time and datetime are still not supported.

While this is years overdue, I can't imagine it being a huge problem. It would be a nice to have for developers, though.

[cj.wijtmans]

So they are doing lots of unnecesary work while they could put that work into making the switch to servo faster? Also stop being offtopic and instigating language flame wars its annoying as hell.

[Michael_S]

They keep changing their minds about what Servo means for Firefox. The latest is that they will chop off parts of it and shove it into their new-new rendering engine called Quantum or something. Which seems like an odd way to go about things but what do I know.

It's the most practical path forward. Think of the options:

1. Halt all work on Firefox Gecko except security fixes. Work on Servo until it's ready to replace Gecko completely in one shot, which will take years. By the time Servo is ready for production, the whole Firefox project will be dead because people keep leaving Firefox for Chrome. "It's 2020! Try the brand new Firefox! Better than ever before!" "Who cares? The whole world uses Chrome!"

2. Keep working on Firefox Gecko. Keep working on Servo until it's ready to replace Gecko completely. Fine, except that it means Mozilla needs more engineers working on rendering for both browsers or else the pace of development slows.

3. (What they're actually doing.) As each component of Servo finishes, swap that component into Gecko. Then you can stop maintaining the older Gecko component. You also get the performance and security advantages from Servo into Firefox sooner.

[Michael_S]

They keep changing their minds about what Servo means for Firefox. The latest is that they will chop off parts of it and shove it into their new-new rendering engine called Quantum or something. Which seems like an odd way to go about things but what do I know.

(I tried to respond before, but the post seemed to be dropped silently. I didn't even get the "Unapproved" message.)

Quantum isn't a new engine, Quantum is the project to take finished pieces of Servo and use them to replace older pieces of Gecko. So when Quantum is done, Firefox will be completely using Servo as its rendering engine and Gecko will be retired.

The only other way Mozilla could work is to keep maintaining all of Gecko until Servo is finished and then swap in Servo all at once. Quantum is better, because they can drop old Gecko code more quickly and get some of the security and speed improvements from Servo into mainstream Firefox faster.

[Creak]

The preprocessor is not "another language needed to make it work", at least not for C++. Modern C++ guidelines discourage the use of the preprocessor, and once the modules TS arrives it will be mostly neutered anyway.

Modules will prevent precompiled headers, that's good, but still a long way to go before removing entirely the #include (which is a preprocessor command and is mandatory in any respectful project).

Moreover, if you'd like to add cross-platform compatibility at least, you'll have to use #define and #if/#else/#endif.
As of today, compilers are smart enough to remove code that isn't executed. So it's not unconceivable to remove entirely the preprocessor commands. An equivalent of 'static const' or 'constexpr' included in the language and usable outside of functions should be doable.

One thing will remain though: code generation through macros. By definition, this must be done in the preprocessor pass.

Firefox still does not run on Wayland.
input fields of type date, time and datetime are still not supported.

It works here on Firefox 50.1.0 on Fedora 25.
BTW bug77 Firefox is now using GTK 3 since version 46: https://en.opensuse.org/Firefox-gtk3

Edit:
Maybe the work is not over yet though: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=627699
Fedora probably merged some of the patches so that it works on wayland (I do have a problem though on wayland, yet hit alt-tab, the Firefox menu bar appears)

[bug77]

Creak Yeah, FF50 still has a dependency on GTK2. But hey, if it already works on Fedora, support can't be that far off.

[Steffo]

I don't know why we're talking about programming languages, but C is a beautiful language. It's also wildly misunderstood by kids who first learned modern languages and are convinced that if their code compiles it should work. Pure C requires you to think and understand how a processor works. No way around it and there shouldn't be for a low level language.

Not true. C is an abstraction over hardware. You don't need to know much about it beyond stack and heap.