Servo: Building a Parallel Browser
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN commenters cite it as a detailed source on Servo's design and performance, including plans to move Servo code into Gecko.
What it is
Jack Moffitt presents Servo, an experimental browser engine written in Rust and designed to be parallel at every level, using multiple cores, the GPU, fork-join concurrency and SIMD. The talk covers motivations, architecture and plans for the project.
Recommended by 1 HN commenters across 1 different months, 2015 to 2017.
What Hacker News said
Recommends buster · 2017-04 · on “Servo nightly builds on Windows now available”
After seeing a youtube demo[[1] of how the aggressive parallelisation that is done in Servo (safely possible by using Rust) speeds up this browser, i'm really excited for Servo! Also, i think this will give us a great base for all kinds of browser embedding what is not based on ancient webkit-gtk. There is another nice presentation on Rust and Servo: [this video] [1]: [LINK]
Cites gulpahum · 2015-01 · on “Servo: Building a Parallel Browser [video]”
In the video (at 35:39), they show the future plans and the plan is to start using bits of Servo code in Gecko. So, they will replace small parts of C++ code with Rust. [this video] One plan was to first replace easy parts, like image decoders (bmp/ico formats). [LINK] It won't be a one big replacement, more like a gradual take over.
Cites metajack · 2017-08 · on “Inside a fast CSS engine”
I suspect you will hear a lot of numbers around the time of the 57 launch, and until then people will keep quiet as they try to make the numbers that get revealed as good as possible. For old numbers, you can get some in some of my old presentations at conferences. I think the LCA 2015 one[1] has the most details in that regard. [1] [this video]
Cites lkbm · 2017-08 · on “Inside a fast CSS engine”
Metajack mention power usage with parallelization briefly here[0], but doesn't provide the data. [0] [this video] (2015)