Rusty revenant Servo returns to render once more A pleasant surprise from Open Source Summit is that Servo, the Rusty rendering engine that Mozilla was working on – until COVID, that is – is showing green shoots of renewed vigor. Servo has been around for about a decade, so as experimental software projects go, it's a mature one. Igalia developer Manuel Rego presented a talk …
Developing a new engine is incredibly hard. It's not just about testing for correctness but handling badly behaved websites and safely and securely implementing a gazillion web standards. It took years for NGlayout / Gecko to be fit for purpose and this Servo would need that amount of time as well.
I should say that Firefox does have a CSS engine that was rewritten in Rust and benefits from massive concurrency which made it far more performant. It's a shame that servo was dropped before getting to fruition but I guess it has a second chance now.
The cult like zeal with with Linux elders are embracing Rust, right down the literal core, is just worrying. I can't wait to see Linux in 15 years time when they decide that following trends was not such a good idea and have to code it out. No C/C++ are not perfect but they've served well and as they say, "If it ain't broke....then keep your f**king hands off it until you understand it!".
[Author here]
> "If it ain't broke..."
But it *is* broken. It always was.
C is not a low level language, because we do not use very fast PDPs.
https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3212479
That C is low level is 1990s industry folklore. It's a lie.
C is what was left of BCPL that Thompson managed to squeeze into the memory of the original PDP that UNIX was written on.
https://lobste.rs/s/njlte7/unix_haters_handbook_1994#c_sg2khb
BCPL was a far more capable language.
It was the core of TRIPOS, which in turn was the core of the original AmigaOS.
https://www.pagetable.com/?p=193
That evolved into Helios, the original Transputer cluster OS.
https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/06/heliosng/
It was the original language the Xerox Alto was implemented in.
http://www.righto.com/2016/06/hello-world-in-bcpl-language-on-xerox.html
For nearly 50 years people have been trying to re-extend C without understanding what C was cut down from, often by bolting OOPS onto it, resulting mostly in bloated messes. C++, C#, Objective-C, legions of them.
Only a few tried to address the core issues: D-Lang, for instance.
Now finally people are re-examining the important bits and trying to work on successors to C. Rust, Go, Zig, Hare, etc.
Thanks! Glad you liked it.
I think Verity Stob has retired now, alas, but her pearls of insight remain worth reading:
https://www.theregister.com/Print/2008/01/20/verity_stob_short_curly/
<- this one just taught me about the ICI language, of which you will hear little because it's not FOSS, but public domain, so nobody has to share it or what they're doing with it. Verily the outcast of the 12 tribes.
Maybe Plest's use of the word 'cult' has infuriated some. Perhaps "super-intrigued hyper-enthusiasts" could be substituted?
Thing is, we've seen these cycles of enthusiasm before, so many times.
While I said 'cycles', I rather think of these in terms of a swinging pendulum. First time seen, the pendulum is whizzing along and gaining speed. Wait a bit and everyone's amazed at the velocity of adoption. Wait a bit more and the objections and caveats start slowing that juggernaut. Then there's the 'stop' let's think about the proper place for this. And back and forth a few times till things settle down.
Only after time and experimentation will we find the correct center of gravity for this beast. In the meantime I'm trying my best to ignore the heavies swinging their egos about.
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