Mozilla is one of my favorite tech companies. Servo is a great example: Mozilla is willing to engage in fundamental CS research. Not only are they trying to put together a parallel, secure browser engine from the ground up, but they even created Rust to do so. This is truly long-term work, which seems rare in an increasingly short-term world.
And Rust isn't just another C clone with OOP or CSP bolted on: it's principled, relatively elegant and takes full advantage of the last few decades of PL research. All while being practical—it has to be, since it's evolved with a Servo as a concomitant project. A non-trivial companion project like that seems great for naturally guiding a language! Not many other languages can say any of this, much less ones actually poised to replace C++ or at least do actual systems programming.
And Mozilla is doing all this in a completely open and transparent way. I think this is incredibly important: anybody can get a glimpse into active development or even contribute. Just go to the relevant GitHub repo[1][2] and you're set. This is the way open source is supposed to work, rather than having companies develop behind close doors and dump source code occasionally (although that's also better than nothing).
I really wish more companies would take this sort of approach with their open source or basic research work. This gives me more confidence in Servo, Rust and Mozilla as a whole, especially compared to many of Mozilla's competitors (both in the browser space and in programming languages).
> A non-trivial companion project like that seems great for naturally guiding a language!
It's definitely an interesting aspect. For most languages, the only substantial project during their early life is their own compiler. There is an intriguing theory (posted on HN a few weeks back?) that this results in languages that are optimised for writing compilers, at the expense of writing other things.
Are there other examples of languages that had this kind of companion project in their early life? Did UNIX do this for C? To what extent did Rails do it for Ruby? Is there something inside JetBrains that does it for Kotlin, or inside JBoss that does it for Ceylon?
The Mozilla foundation is a nonprofit, not a company -- which is probably why it's doing all of these great things that profit seeking companies are not.
This is an amazing and challenging project to work on. If you'd like to join us, we hang out in #servo on irc.mozilla.org or just dive right into the code[1]. You don't need previous browser hacking experience, and we're happy to mentor you through a bug.
We're opening three full-time positions on the Servo team at Mozilla Research within the next couple of days; they should be up on the careers[2] page soon.
Also, if you're a graduate student, Mozilla Research is still looking for summer interns for Servo, Daala, Shumway, and other projects. Those positions are also on the careers page.
What's the relation between Servo and the Quark browser kernel mentioned on the Servo page?
Quark is a formally verified kernel made of a few hundreds of lines of (C ? C++ ?) code. It's been verified using Coq and hence I take it it's guaranteed from a whole class of bugs typically leading to security exploits (buffer overrun/overflow/underrun, dangling pointer, null pointer, ...).
Is Servo using Quark? If not, is Servo formally verified using Coq?
To me formally verified software are one of the most interesting development we're seeing (that and deterministic builds seems to be huge steps forward towards more security), so I'd like to know more...
Servo is not using Quark, and is not formally verified. I assume the link on the Servo page is along the lines of pointing out another cool project in a similar space of writing safer browsers.
Formal verification is cool, but speaking as somebody who worked out it for about 7 years, it is not really ready to be used in large software. Most people care much more about performance and features for their browser. Hopefully by writing a browser in Rust instead of C++, the result will be much more secure, but not have to make many compromises.
Yes, we've been both following and collaborating with the rest of the people who do research in this space. In particular, Ras Bodik's group (first link) has been partially sponsored by Mozilla Research for several years. We've also leaned heavily on members of these groups as interns in the past, and they've written large portions of our parallelism-friendly layout code, etc.
Some additional interesting links to both publications and talks are available on our wiki below (though it's not comprehensive):
If you visit #servo on irc.mozilla.org, there is a "crowbot" that will dig up the github link if you reference a pr/issue number and will correct you if you link to an outdated web platform spec :-)
Since Rust was born out of a vision to build the next-gen browser engine, does anyone know why Rust does not have bindings to GTK ? The only two projects (on github) are 1-2 years old.
I was hoping Rust could overtake Vala as the goto language for desktop software in the GTK world.
In my experience, Rust is currently in a phase where the correct answer to "I'd love to use rust for xyz, why doesn't it have support for that?" is typically "that's a good idea, you should add that!". That's either exciting or frustrating depending on your point of view. Unfortunately, the next logical question of "ok, how do I make and distribute a library?" currently doesn't have a satisfying answer, as they've just scrapped the package manager. It sounds like they want to hire somebody to work full-time on a replacement, so hopefully that is a temporary problem.
Jürg Billeter created Vala for the sole purpose of building GTK / GNOME applications and the two projects are tightly coupled.
It's not to say that Rust won't have GTK bindings in the future, but it's not a high priority for either Mozilla or GNOME devs and unlikely to displace Vala.
So, talking about Servo being "implemented into Firefox" might set the wrong expectations. At the moment it is very unclear if or how it will be turned into a consumer-facing product.
That said, the goal of Servo is to improve both speed and safety.
In terms of speed, part of the project is research into parallel algorithms for various parts of the web stack. For example Servo today has parallel implementations of various parts of CSS. The goal here is to make the sequential performance on par with the best implementations today and then get a further speedup by using multiple cores efficiently.
In terms of safety, the choice of Rust over C++ provides substantially stronger compiler-enforced guarantees of memory safety that should help eliminate a large class of bugs that have caused numerous security issues in current browsers.
If this sounds interesting there are plenty of ways to get involved; come chat on #servo on Mozilla IRC.
Responsiveness (commonly defined as time from start of operation to completion) might improve from parallelization. As for "speed" (commonly defined as operations/sec on a given hardware), it will likely be the same or a little lower (parallelism creates overheard).
But it's responsiveness that most people measure, and they measure it on machines with CPU utilization in the single digits - in which case, it is likely to improve considerably.
It's a rewrite of the engine from scratch, focused on parallel computing. So yes, it's going to be a massive improvement of speed, security and overall revamping.
We currently have GPU compositing and rendering[1]. Other browsers will get this eventually and some have it already.
We plan to explore this space quite a bit.
The other thing we're starting to think about is using SIMD ops for layout, which isn't a GPU but falls into a similar "taking advantage of modern hardware" bucket.
[1] Note that 2D rendering on the GPU is not currently a clear win. In theory you save a texture upload and get massively parallel drawing operations, but in practice there's a lot of overhead to deal with.
We're certainly planning to investigate it, particularly with the advent of vector units that reduce the latency of data transfers, such as AMD's new Opterons and Intel's Knight's Landing. The challenge here is that while several of the stages (e.g. CSS selector matching) can be trivially sped up on a GPU, the CPU/GPU latency cost is going to be close to the original CPU evaluation time.
There are some very sequential and unfortunately common "corner cases" in layout (e.g., uncleared floats) that have lead us to currently prefer the higher clock-speed CPU for parallelizing phases. Even if we find a great way to work around floats, it's likely there will still be a lot of CPU/GPU chatter, which makes it difficult to use today's GPU cards when you're trying to keep total page load well under 200ms and incremental reflows < 15ms.
[+] [-] tikhonj|12 years ago|reply
And Rust isn't just another C clone with OOP or CSP bolted on: it's principled, relatively elegant and takes full advantage of the last few decades of PL research. All while being practical—it has to be, since it's evolved with a Servo as a concomitant project. A non-trivial companion project like that seems great for naturally guiding a language! Not many other languages can say any of this, much less ones actually poised to replace C++ or at least do actual systems programming.
And Mozilla is doing all this in a completely open and transparent way. I think this is incredibly important: anybody can get a glimpse into active development or even contribute. Just go to the relevant GitHub repo[1][2] and you're set. This is the way open source is supposed to work, rather than having companies develop behind close doors and dump source code occasionally (although that's also better than nothing).
I really wish more companies would take this sort of approach with their open source or basic research work. This gives me more confidence in Servo, Rust and Mozilla as a whole, especially compared to many of Mozilla's competitors (both in the browser space and in programming languages).
[1]: https://github.com/mozilla/servo/ [2]: https://github.com/mozilla/rust
[+] [-] twic|12 years ago|reply
It's definitely an interesting aspect. For most languages, the only substantial project during their early life is their own compiler. There is an intriguing theory (posted on HN a few weeks back?) that this results in languages that are optimised for writing compilers, at the expense of writing other things.
Are there other examples of languages that had this kind of companion project in their early life? Did UNIX do this for C? To what extent did Rails do it for Ruby? Is there something inside JetBrains that does it for Kotlin, or inside JBoss that does it for Ceylon?
[+] [-] rweir|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] nabilhassein|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] metajack|12 years ago|reply
We're opening three full-time positions on the Servo team at Mozilla Research within the next couple of days; they should be up on the careers[2] page soon.
Also, if you're a graduate student, Mozilla Research is still looking for summer interns for Servo, Daala, Shumway, and other projects. Those positions are also on the careers page.
[1]: https://github.com/mozilla/servo/ [2]: https://careers.mozilla.org/en-US/
[+] [-] girvo|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TacticalCoder|12 years ago|reply
Quark is a formally verified kernel made of a few hundreds of lines of (C ? C++ ?) code. It's been verified using Coq and hence I take it it's guaranteed from a whole class of bugs typically leading to security exploits (buffer overrun/overflow/underrun, dangling pointer, null pointer, ...).
Is Servo using Quark? If not, is Servo formally verified using Coq?
To me formally verified software are one of the most interesting development we're seeing (that and deterministic builds seems to be huge steps forward towards more security), so I'd like to know more...
(gone building Servo on my Debian box)
[+] [-] mccr8|12 years ago|reply
Formal verification is cool, but speaking as somebody who worked out it for about 7 years, it is not really ready to be used in large software. Most people care much more about performance and features for their browser. Hopefully by writing a browser in Rust instead of C++, the result will be much more secure, but not have to make many compromises.
[+] [-] userbinator|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] larsberg|12 years ago|reply
Some additional interesting links to both publications and talks are available on our wiki below (though it's not comprehensive):
https://github.com/mozilla/servo/wiki/General-implementation...
[+] [-] al2o3cr|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kibwen|12 years ago|reply
https://github.com/mozilla/servo/issues/111
[+] [-] larsberg|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kibwen|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sandGorgon|12 years ago|reply
I was hoping Rust could overtake Vala as the goto language for desktop software in the GTK world.
[+] [-] sanderjd|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bjz_|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wting|12 years ago|reply
Jürg Billeter created Vala for the sole purpose of building GTK / GNOME applications and the two projects are tightly coupled.
It's not to say that Rust won't have GTK bindings in the future, but it's not a high priority for either Mozilla or GNOME devs and unlikely to displace Vala.
[+] [-] jbrooksuk|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jgraham|12 years ago|reply
That said, the goal of Servo is to improve both speed and safety.
In terms of speed, part of the project is research into parallel algorithms for various parts of the web stack. For example Servo today has parallel implementations of various parts of CSS. The goal here is to make the sequential performance on par with the best implementations today and then get a further speedup by using multiple cores efficiently.
In terms of safety, the choice of Rust over C++ provides substantially stronger compiler-enforced guarantees of memory safety that should help eliminate a large class of bugs that have caused numerous security issues in current browsers.
If this sounds interesting there are plenty of ways to get involved; come chat on #servo on Mozilla IRC.
[+] [-] beagle3|12 years ago|reply
But it's responsiveness that most people measure, and they measure it on machines with CPU utilization in the single digits - in which case, it is likely to improve considerably.
[+] [-] paraboul|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] higherpurpose|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] metajack|12 years ago|reply
We plan to explore this space quite a bit.
The other thing we're starting to think about is using SIMD ops for layout, which isn't a GPU but falls into a similar "taking advantage of modern hardware" bucket.
[1] Note that 2D rendering on the GPU is not currently a clear win. In theory you save a texture upload and get massively parallel drawing operations, but in practice there's a lot of overhead to deal with.
[+] [-] larsberg|12 years ago|reply
There are some very sequential and unfortunately common "corner cases" in layout (e.g., uncleared floats) that have lead us to currently prefer the higher clock-speed CPU for parallelizing phases. Even if we find a great way to work around floats, it's likely there will still be a lot of CPU/GPU chatter, which makes it difficult to use today's GPU cards when you're trying to keep total page load well under 200ms and incremental reflows < 15ms.
[+] [-] kibwen|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] higherpurpose|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulrouget|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ZeroGravitas|12 years ago|reply