Comment by alkonaut
8 months ago
Nice to see. The only thing that would meaningfully set it apart from the others would be to have a core that isn’t a big ball of C++. That would potentially allow it to be developed and maintained with less resource than the other browsers, and that would be the only way this ever reaches any kind of impact.
If I'm not wrong Firefox is already Rust. The language was even created inside Mozilla.
Only around 11% of it is Rust according to https://4e6.github.io/firefox-lang-stats/ , which by the way is no small feat given how huge the code base is.
It is. They realized that writing a modern browser (i.e. one that for example uses multiple cores efficiently by doing layout/rendering/etc in parallel) is almost impossible in C++. To the point where creating a whole new language just to solve the problem would be a smaller undertaking. Which says something about the scope of this problem. And I really do think they are right.
> writing a modern browser (i.e. one that for example uses multiple cores efficiently by doing layout/rendering/etc in parallel) is almost impossible in C++
C++ also happens to be the only language in which that has been accomplished, so far. (The Rust components are relatively smaller, about 11% according to sibling comments.)
See also: AAA video games
Why is it almost impossible? I'm a little out of practice with C++ but I thought the modern C++ features were considered pretty solid in regards to memory safety and the like?
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> They realized that writing a modern browser (i.e. one that for example uses multiple cores efficiently by doing layout/rendering/etc in parallel) is almost impossible in C++
And yet Chrome does it just fine, and Ladybird can render some websites properly that Servo cannot, curious.
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Eh that is a huge stretch. Besides Firefox is still significantly less performant than Chromium.
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except they jettisoned the Servo project...