Mozilla's Servo Begins Firming Up 2017 Goals

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Mozilla's Servo Begins Firming Up 2017 Goals

Mozilla's experimental layout engine, Servo, is working on figuring out their goals for 2017...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Mozilla-Servo-2017-Planning

[tildearrow]

Typo:

initial layout integration i nother products,

[FishPls]

Still no SVG? Sigh.

I wonder when I can actually use Servo for something. Research is cool and all, but results should follow.

[Baemir]

Still no SVG? Sigh.

I wonder when I can actually use Servo for something. Research is cool and all, but results should follow.

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.

[shmerl]

Do they plan to use Vulkan for WebRender?

[Creak]

http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/c++/linus

I know that I have no weight against Linus Torvalds, but I disagree.
I'm a game developer and although games aren't the most secured code (it's clearly not the NASA), it would probably won't be possible to make them without C++. And memory is very *very* important in video games. Only considering design patterns and modularity without considering the memory cost is as stupid in C than in C++.

Abstraction is the base of programming: C is an abstraction of assembly, which is an abstraction of binary. And there are bad programmers both in C and in C++. Saying that C++ programmers are bigots compared to C programmers is exactly like saying that C# programmers are complete morons compared to C++ programmers.

Edit:
And about the compiler... Linus' emails is from 2007, in 10 years there's been quite some improvements in the domain.

That being said, I agree with Linus that C++ is a horrible programming language, but C has so little features that it's hard to be wrong: basically you have functions with parameters and when there's too much parameters you can create structures. But in the end, C and C++ are both horrible languages: the mere fact that they can't work without another language on top of them, the preprocessor, is proof of its fundamental problem.

But most of the modern programming language doesn't come even close to what C and C++ can achieve. At some point, I hoped that D could become an challenger, now I'm looking at Rust.

[GrayShade]

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.

The plan is to to take parts of Servo and integrate them into Firefox/Gecko. It would be impossible to replace Gecko in one fell swoop, so they started small. I expect Servo and Firefox to always be developed separately, with components slowly trickling down when they are deemed ready, like in the ship of Theseus story.

[Jabberwocky]

I tried compiling and running the release binary, both resulting in my OS freezing completely. MacBook Pro (13-inch, Early 2011) running OS X 10.11.6 (15G1212).

It has been a few years since an application froze my OS, so I'll give them that.

[GrayShade]

I tried compiling and running the release binary, both resulting in my OS freezing completely. MacBook Pro (13-inch, Early 2011) running OS X 10.11.6 (15G1212).

It has been a few years since an application froze my OS, so I'll give them that.

Well, user-mode apps shouldn't be able to freeze the OS.

[hansg]

But in the end, C and C++ are both horrible languages: the mere fact that they can't work without another language on top of them, the preprocessor, is proof of its fundamental problem.

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.