7 ms·

This Week In Servo 69

212 points by simondelacourt 10y ago

btrask 10y ago
It's really just an announcement of an announcement. Or charitably, a confirmation that they don't plan on missing the June release date. I've been checking their mailing list and bug tracker and saw nary a peep about the alpha, so it's good to hear something.
paulrouget 10y ago
No. The blog post says to expect the announcement later this week.
- simondelacourt 10y ago
  I've edited the title to get it more in line with the blog post
spiderfarmer 10y ago
In their blog post, what do they mean by "public domain list"?
- ivank 10y ago
  I think they mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Suffix_List https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Suffix_List
  - spiderfarmer 10y ago
    So they achieved a 25% performance increase all from better parsing and a better algorithm for this[1] list? That's unexpected indead. I would love to see a blogpost with details on that. [1] https://publicsuffix.org/list/public_suffix_list.dat https://publicsuffix.org/list/public_suffix_list.dat
    - jontro 10y ago
      They changed the implementation from always iterating over this 6000 length array: https://github.com/fduraffourg/servo/blob/8bb853f64354b2cc1b9f9e0ea416efdd79096418/components/net/pub_domains.rs https://github.com/fduraffourg/servo/blob/8bb853f64354b2cc1b... to a HashSet which is only filled once based on a text file. The domain list also more easily updated now with a python script.
      - scrollaway 10y ago
        Why are there actual services in that list? I see all the variations of blogspot.com for example, which is definitely not an eTLD. Are services providing subdomain registration supposed to talk to Mozilla and get themselves added to it? I don't see deviantart in there.
        simonw 10y ago
        Services which allow their users to post custom HTML and JavaScript to their own subdomains (without filtering to exclude scripts) need to go on that list to prevent eg evil.blogspot.com from stealing cookies that were set on innocent.blogspot.com
        scrollaway 10y ago
        Why is that the responsibility of the browser and not the website's owner?
        spiderfarmer 10y ago
        I don't understand either, with user generated subdomains I thought it was common practice to use a completely different domain for all trusted activity.
        jerf 10y ago
        Nothing profound, just historical reasons. To really show the problem, you have to do something like contrast how "blogspot.com" is a top-level site, one level below a TLD, but so is bbc.co.uk, one level below what "co.uk". The naive "count one element" doesn't work, or all of "co.uk" would share cookies. And it turns out that now there just isn't much you can do other than have a huge table. Sure, we'd probably do it differently if we had it to do all over again, but, we don't.
nachtigall 10y ago
> https://treeherder.allizom.org/perf.html#/graphs?timerange=2592000&series=%5Bservo,fa13b4451149bf7a5cc1361e22154f5165ec3734,1,8%5D&series=%5Bservo,1e657115c9bc80a8400875ebc0e0c97402899f67,1,8%5D&series=%5Bservo,0f0b217962ea5748c137d0c5927bd85c28ec2661,1,8%5D&series=%5Bservo,8bf74f1cf43a3628d242086847b2048444d1a55a,1,8%5D&series=%5Bservo,9241bc5d3b8170dcaa8efaa06c972fbae9334772,1,8%5D https://treeherder.allizom.org/perf.html#/graphs?timerange=2... > a new automated page load testing performance infrastructure that he has been testing. It compares Servo daily builds against Firefox for page load on a subset of the Alexa Top 1000 sites. Check it out! I don't understand the graphs under the link. Under all colors it says "servo" and "linux64". So what is Firefox (gecko), what servo?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- ZeroGravitas 10y ago
  The yellow and green have gecko at the start of the title in the key.
  - nickez 10y ago
    New colours every time you reload the page..
  - tauchunfall 10y ago
    The colors actually change after each page refresh
- Touche 10y ago
  Not to be negative, but I don't know if the benchmarks tell you much given the fact that Servo still has a ways to go before it renders sites properly. I periodically test it out (most recently yesterday, in fact) and on popular sites like espn.com and cnn.com it doesn't render them properly. Meaning, not the padding is a little off, but parts of the page simply don't render at all. This is not a criticism of their efforts, which are impressive, just pointing out that it might not be ready to compare in terms of performance.
hawski 10y ago
Does anyone know what is on Y axis in comparison graph? Is it load time in miliseconds? Are green and red lines for Firefox and others for servo? Servo is written in every case there, but green and red have "gecko" prefix.
- StavrosK 10y ago
  Yeah, that graph is inscrutable.
  - metajack 10y ago
    We know. It's not really meant for public consumption, and we are trying to fit into the monitoring pipelines the Firefox team has already created. This should improve over time as we get better at using that infrastructure, and we'll make sure to post readable versions when we are trying to reach out to a wider audience.
    - nachtigall 10y ago
      Thanks for the general fix. Appreciated! In this case, just a few words of explanation in the blog post would have been sufficient ;)
- espadrine 10y ago
  I believe the Y axis shows milliseconds. Lower is better. The colors change over page reloads, but the lines at the bottom are Firefox. It is faster currently, but the Servo lines are winning ground.
adashi 10y ago
Is this the browser.html that is referenced? https://github.com/browserhtml/browserhtml https://github.com/browserhtml/browserhtml `Browser.html: an experimental browser UI for desktop.`
- Ygg2 10y ago
  Yes, I believe it is. Especially, since it mentions Servo in README.
- nachtigall 10y ago
  Yes.
tjallingt 10y ago
Hey, maybe this isn't the right place but i wouldn't know where else to ask this question: I'd like to get into Rust development and maybe help out with Servo (because it seems like an awesome project) but i have very limited experience with c/c++ (arduino and openframeworks). What is a good way/place to get comfortable with Rust? (I am using Windows, can you even develop with Rust on Windows?)
- StavrosK 10y ago
  I'm currently reading this: https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ It's very nice, and the people on IRC are extremely helpful.
  - deutronium 10y ago
    I've found the Rust IRC channel to be awesome too!
  - bjz_ 10y ago
    For those reading, just remember to check out #rust on irc.mozilla.org - it's far more active than the freenode channel. Here's a list of the current rust-related channels on Mozilla's IRC server: https://www.rust-lang.org/community.html#irc-channels https://www.rust-lang.org/community.html#irc-channels
- seren 10y ago
  Also http://rustbyexample.com/ http://rustbyexample.com/ Windows is a supported plateform, msi are available on https://www.rust-lang.org/ https://www.rust-lang.org/
- chriswarbo 10y ago
  https://servo.org https://servo.org also has a "Contributing" section, which links to bugs tagged as "easy" for new contributors.
  - nachtigall 10y ago
    There's a helper page for this: https://starters.servo.org/ https://starters.servo.org/
youdontknowtho 10y ago
Are they doing security testing as they go? I'm really looking forward to seeing how it fares against the typical "use after free" javascript errors that pwn to own always demo's. I'm not particularly a fan of Rust, but I certainly like the ideas that they are trying to incorporate in it. Great stuff. Looking forward to see how it evolves.
- legulere 10y ago
  Servo doesn't contain an own javascript engine. Use after free generally isn't possible in rust in safe code.
- geofft 10y ago
  I enjoyed this 2014 blog post on how they avoid use-after-frees by design, by letting SpiderMonkey have responsibility for all DOM garbage collection: https://blog.mozilla.org/research/2014/08/26/javascript-servos-only-garbage-collector/ https://blog.mozilla.org/research/2014/08/26/javascript-serv...
  - youdontknowtho 10y ago
    Ooh. Nice one, mate. Thanks.
alimbada 10y ago
> June is also when the first Rust code ships in release Firefox! Anyone know what Rust code is shipping in Firefox? Source: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JMOtVkRtb-s7auoQdnX810HGglkMK054LTXOo0_rdrU/pub https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JMOtVkRtb-s7auoQdnX810HG...
- TomasSedovic 10y ago
  This library for parsing mp4 metadata: https://github.com/mozilla/mp4parse-rust https://github.com/mozilla/mp4parse-rust Source: http://blog.rust-lang.org/2016/05/16/rust-at-one-year.html http://blog.rust-lang.org/2016/05/16/rust-at-one-year.html
- larsberg 10y ago
  You can follow along with the process of shipping Rust code in Firefox here: http://wiki.mozilla.org/Oxidation http://wiki.mozilla.org/Oxidation
_pmf_ 10y ago
I'm not a Mozilla fan at all, but the Rust and Servo team certainly don't fuck around.
- skrowl 10y ago
  Out of curiosity, why don't you like Mozilla? In my opinion they're the only ones left pushing for an open & standards-based web. Certainly not Google with their hard push to make developers make Chrome Apps instead of web apps and obviously Apple doesn't push open anything, ever.
- akerro 10y ago
  I'm Firefox and Thunderbird user, I also don't like Mozilla, but I'm full of respect for their work and... there is literally nothing better...
rajaravivarma_r 10y ago
Totally irrelevant: But did anybody else notice '(John) Connor (Kate) Brewster'?
- cbrewster 10y ago
  Its Connor MacLeod, not John Connor ;)
pointernil 10y ago
Servo is using zero-copy parallel parsing of html, css and parallel rendering, right? Is it trying to reduce in-going data duplication? Any insiders (actually understanding this questions ;) who can comment on this?
- Manishearth 10y ago
  > zero-copy parallel parsing of html, zero copy yes, parallel I don't know We do selector matching in parallel (parsing is probably serial?), layout in parallel, and offload almost all of the rendering work onto the GPU. Not sure what you mean by "in-going data duplication". We try to be zero-copy when we can, and share as much as possible. Rust helps here; because you are free to try and share things without worrying if they will go out of scope too early, and the compiler will tell you if your guess was wrong.
  - pointernil 10y ago
    Thanks! "in-going data duplication" ummm... i guess i meant ;) duplication of the incoming data (network packets->buffers->resources like html-files etc) in the sense of trying to minimize the amount of data duplicated and moved around to be used by various code-parts. Most probably the most interesting parts are those areas where even Rust can't really "help" to prevent that. thanks
    - Manishearth 10y ago
      ..... grins sheepishly As Jack mentioned in another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11994607 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11994607), a lot of our glue is slow just because we haven't paid attention to it. Some of this is duplication of the kind you specify. So we do do a lot of extra copying. Especially once we switched to multiprocess -- there's a ton of data being passed between processes through a copy that really should use shared memory or something. It's pretty straightforward to fix in most cases, but we just haven't gotten to it. Like many other issues we have. Servo is mostly a testbed for the smaller components, so this is to some degree okay. My favorite example of this is that we probably contain the worst cache implementation ever. Before multiprocess, we still used threads and senders a lot. So switching to multiprocess just involved replacing certain threads with processes, and using IPC instead of regular sync::mpsc senders. One thing that got caught in the mix was our font cache. This cache loads fonts from disk and shares them with content threads till they aren't needed anymore. It was a simple cache, implemented as an atomic refcounted weak pointer being stored in the cache while strong refcounted pointers are being handed out to content threads. In the process world, refcounted pointers are duplicated across IPC with their refcounts reset to one. So this involves copying the whole font across IPC. Inefficient in itself. Also, on Linux, our IPC currently assumes /tmp is tempfs (it isn't in many cases), and uses it for shared memory. So, our cache, to save us from loading fonts from disk, loads a font from disk, and each time a process wants it, stores the file to disk in /tmp and has that process load it from disk. Which is unequivocally worse than what we had :) It's not hard to fix, though. But it's stuff like this that we still have. It doesn't have to do with Rust, just has to do with priorities. My plan here is to first get a sane IPC shared memory implementation for Linux (to be used whenever we send gobs of data across a process), and build a better caching layer over it for the font cache. (If you like OS stuff and want to help ; let me know!) However, the individual components themselves are pretty great!
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
montyedwards 10y ago
Servo would be more compelling for use with commercial software if had MIT or Apache license. The MPL isn't as bad as GPL but still isn't as generous to the developer as MIT or Apache. With the right license, Servo would be a slam dunk for replacing CEF in commercial software that prohibits reversing or tampering.
- metajack 10y ago
  The license isn't really up for negotiation, but I'm curious what you think there is to gain with more liberal licensing? All the competing engines are either equivalently or more restrictively licensed, no?
lewisl9029 10y ago
Really looking forward to trying out the browser.html tech preview! Especially since it seems to have native support for a vertical tab layout with autohide!

212 points by simondelacourt 10y ago

It's really just an announcement of an announcement. Or charitably, a confirmation that they don't plan on missing the June release date. I've been checking their mailing list and bug tracker and saw nary a peep about the alpha, so it's good to hear something.

paulrouget 10y ago

No. The blog post says to expect the announcement later this week.

simondelacourt 10y ago
I've edited the title to get it more in line with the blog post

spiderfarmer 10y ago

In their blog post, what do they mean by "public domain list"?

ivank 10y ago
I think they mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Suffix_List https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Suffix_List
- spiderfarmer 10y ago
  So they achieved a 25% performance increase all from better parsing and a better algorithm for this[1] list? That's unexpected indead. I would love to see a blogpost with details on that. [1] https://publicsuffix.org/list/public_suffix_list.dat https://publicsuffix.org/list/public_suffix_list.dat
  - jontro 10y ago
    They changed the implementation from always iterating over this 6000 length array: https://github.com/fduraffourg/servo/blob/8bb853f64354b2cc1b9f9e0ea416efdd79096418/components/net/pub_domains.rs https://github.com/fduraffourg/servo/blob/8bb853f64354b2cc1b... to a HashSet which is only filled once based on a text file. The domain list also more easily updated now with a python script.
    - scrollaway 10y ago
      Why are there actual services in that list? I see all the variations of blogspot.com for example, which is definitely not an eTLD. Are services providing subdomain registration supposed to talk to Mozilla and get themselves added to it? I don't see deviantart in there.
      - simonw 10y ago
        Services which allow their users to post custom HTML and JavaScript to their own subdomains (without filtering to exclude scripts) need to go on that list to prevent eg evil.blogspot.com from stealing cookies that were set on innocent.blogspot.com
        scrollaway 10y ago
        Why is that the responsibility of the browser and not the website's owner?
        spiderfarmer 10y ago
        I don't understand either, with user generated subdomains I thought it was common practice to use a completely different domain for all trusted activity.
        jerf 10y ago
        Nothing profound, just historical reasons. To really show the problem, you have to do something like contrast how "blogspot.com" is a top-level site, one level below a TLD, but so is bbc.co.uk, one level below what "co.uk". The naive "count one element" doesn't work, or all of "co.uk" would share cookies. And it turns out that now there just isn't much you can do other than have a huge table. Sure, we'd probably do it differently if we had it to do all over again, but, we don't.

nachtigall 10y ago

> https://treeherder.allizom.org/perf.html#/graphs?timerange=2592000&series=%5Bservo,fa13b4451149bf7a5cc1361e22154f5165ec3734,1,8%5D&series=%5Bservo,1e657115c9bc80a8400875ebc0e0c97402899f67,1,8%5D&series=%5Bservo,0f0b217962ea5748c137d0c5927bd85c28ec2661,1,8%5D&series=%5Bservo,8bf74f1cf43a3628d242086847b2048444d1a55a,1,8%5D&series=%5Bservo,9241bc5d3b8170dcaa8efaa06c972fbae9334772,1,8%5D https://treeherder.allizom.org/perf.html#/graphs?timerange=2... > a new automated page load testing performance infrastructure that he has been testing. It compares Servo daily builds against Firefox for page load on a subset of the Alexa Top 1000 sites. Check it out! I don't understand the graphs under the link. Under all colors it says "servo" and "linux64". So what is Firefox (gecko), what servo?

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
ZeroGravitas 10y ago
The yellow and green have gecko at the start of the title in the key.
- nickez 10y ago
  New colours every time you reload the page..
- tauchunfall 10y ago
  The colors actually change after each page refresh
Touche 10y ago
Not to be negative, but I don't know if the benchmarks tell you much given the fact that Servo still has a ways to go before it renders sites properly. I periodically test it out (most recently yesterday, in fact) and on popular sites like espn.com and cnn.com it doesn't render them properly. Meaning, not the padding is a little off, but parts of the page simply don't render at all. This is not a criticism of their efforts, which are impressive, just pointing out that it might not be ready to compare in terms of performance.

hawski 10y ago

Does anyone know what is on Y axis in comparison graph? Is it load time in miliseconds? Are green and red lines for Firefox and others for servo? Servo is written in every case there, but green and red have "gecko" prefix.

StavrosK 10y ago
Yeah, that graph is inscrutable.
- metajack 10y ago
  We know. It's not really meant for public consumption, and we are trying to fit into the monitoring pipelines the Firefox team has already created. This should improve over time as we get better at using that infrastructure, and we'll make sure to post readable versions when we are trying to reach out to a wider audience.
  - nachtigall 10y ago
    Thanks for the general fix. Appreciated! In this case, just a few words of explanation in the blog post would have been sufficient ;)
espadrine 10y ago
I believe the Y axis shows milliseconds. Lower is better. The colors change over page reloads, but the lines at the bottom are Firefox. It is faster currently, but the Servo lines are winning ground.

adashi 10y ago

Is this the browser.html that is referenced? https://github.com/browserhtml/browserhtml https://github.com/browserhtml/browserhtml `Browser.html: an experimental browser UI for desktop.`

Ygg2 10y ago
Yes, I believe it is. Especially, since it mentions Servo in README.
nachtigall 10y ago
Yes.

tjallingt 10y ago

Hey, maybe this isn't the right place but i wouldn't know where else to ask this question: I'd like to get into Rust development and maybe help out with Servo (because it seems like an awesome project) but i have very limited experience with c/c++ (arduino and openframeworks). What is a good way/place to get comfortable with Rust? (I am using Windows, can you even develop with Rust on Windows?)

StavrosK 10y ago
I'm currently reading this: https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ It's very nice, and the people on IRC are extremely helpful.
- deutronium 10y ago
  I've found the Rust IRC channel to be awesome too!
- bjz_ 10y ago
  For those reading, just remember to check out #rust on irc.mozilla.org - it's far more active than the freenode channel. Here's a list of the current rust-related channels on Mozilla's IRC server: https://www.rust-lang.org/community.html#irc-channels https://www.rust-lang.org/community.html#irc-channels
seren 10y ago
Also http://rustbyexample.com/ http://rustbyexample.com/ Windows is a supported plateform, msi are available on https://www.rust-lang.org/ https://www.rust-lang.org/
chriswarbo 10y ago
https://servo.org https://servo.org also has a "Contributing" section, which links to bugs tagged as "easy" for new contributors.
- nachtigall 10y ago
  There's a helper page for this: https://starters.servo.org/ https://starters.servo.org/

youdontknowtho 10y ago

Are they doing security testing as they go? I'm really looking forward to seeing how it fares against the typical "use after free" javascript errors that pwn to own always demo's. I'm not particularly a fan of Rust, but I certainly like the ideas that they are trying to incorporate in it. Great stuff. Looking forward to see how it evolves.

legulere 10y ago
Servo doesn't contain an own javascript engine. Use after free generally isn't possible in rust in safe code.
geofft 10y ago
I enjoyed this 2014 blog post on how they avoid use-after-frees by design, by letting SpiderMonkey have responsibility for all DOM garbage collection: https://blog.mozilla.org/research/2014/08/26/javascript-servos-only-garbage-collector/ https://blog.mozilla.org/research/2014/08/26/javascript-serv...
- youdontknowtho 10y ago
  Ooh. Nice one, mate. Thanks.

alimbada 10y ago

> June is also when the first Rust code ships in release Firefox! Anyone know what Rust code is shipping in Firefox? Source: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JMOtVkRtb-s7auoQdnX810HGglkMK054LTXOo0_rdrU/pub https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JMOtVkRtb-s7auoQdnX810HG...

TomasSedovic 10y ago
This library for parsing mp4 metadata: https://github.com/mozilla/mp4parse-rust https://github.com/mozilla/mp4parse-rust Source: http://blog.rust-lang.org/2016/05/16/rust-at-one-year.html http://blog.rust-lang.org/2016/05/16/rust-at-one-year.html
larsberg 10y ago
You can follow along with the process of shipping Rust code in Firefox here: http://wiki.mozilla.org/Oxidation http://wiki.mozilla.org/Oxidation

_pmf_ 10y ago

I'm not a Mozilla fan at all, but the Rust and Servo team certainly don't fuck around.

skrowl 10y ago
Out of curiosity, why don't you like Mozilla? In my opinion they're the only ones left pushing for an open & standards-based web. Certainly not Google with their hard push to make developers make Chrome Apps instead of web apps and obviously Apple doesn't push open anything, ever.
akerro 10y ago
I'm Firefox and Thunderbird user, I also don't like Mozilla, but I'm full of respect for their work and... there is literally nothing better...

rajaravivarma_r 10y ago

Totally irrelevant: But did anybody else notice '(John) Connor (Kate) Brewster'?

cbrewster 10y ago
Its Connor MacLeod, not John Connor ;)

pointernil 10y ago

Servo is using zero-copy parallel parsing of html, css and parallel rendering, right? Is it trying to reduce in-going data duplication? Any insiders (actually understanding this questions ;) who can comment on this?

Manishearth 10y ago
> zero-copy parallel parsing of html, zero copy yes, parallel I don't know We do selector matching in parallel (parsing is probably serial?), layout in parallel, and offload almost all of the rendering work onto the GPU. Not sure what you mean by "in-going data duplication". We try to be zero-copy when we can, and share as much as possible. Rust helps here; because you are free to try and share things without worrying if they will go out of scope too early, and the compiler will tell you if your guess was wrong.
- pointernil 10y ago
  Thanks! "in-going data duplication" ummm... i guess i meant ;) duplication of the incoming data (network packets->buffers->resources like html-files etc) in the sense of trying to minimize the amount of data duplicated and moved around to be used by various code-parts. Most probably the most interesting parts are those areas where even Rust can't really "help" to prevent that. thanks
  - Manishearth 10y ago
    ..... grins sheepishly As Jack mentioned in another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11994607 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11994607), a lot of our glue is slow just because we haven't paid attention to it. Some of this is duplication of the kind you specify. So we do do a lot of extra copying. Especially once we switched to multiprocess -- there's a ton of data being passed between processes through a copy that really should use shared memory or something. It's pretty straightforward to fix in most cases, but we just haven't gotten to it. Like many other issues we have. Servo is mostly a testbed for the smaller components, so this is to some degree okay. My favorite example of this is that we probably contain the worst cache implementation ever. Before multiprocess, we still used threads and senders a lot. So switching to multiprocess just involved replacing certain threads with processes, and using IPC instead of regular sync::mpsc senders. One thing that got caught in the mix was our font cache. This cache loads fonts from disk and shares them with content threads till they aren't needed anymore. It was a simple cache, implemented as an atomic refcounted weak pointer being stored in the cache while strong refcounted pointers are being handed out to content threads. In the process world, refcounted pointers are duplicated across IPC with their refcounts reset to one. So this involves copying the whole font across IPC. Inefficient in itself. Also, on Linux, our IPC currently assumes /tmp is tempfs (it isn't in many cases), and uses it for shared memory. So, our cache, to save us from loading fonts from disk, loads a font from disk, and each time a process wants it, stores the file to disk in /tmp and has that process load it from disk. Which is unequivocally worse than what we had :) It's not hard to fix, though. But it's stuff like this that we still have. It doesn't have to do with Rust, just has to do with priorities. My plan here is to first get a sane IPC shared memory implementation for Linux (to be used whenever we send gobs of data across a process), and build a better caching layer over it for the font cache. (If you like OS stuff and want to help ; let me know!) However, the individual components themselves are pretty great!

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

montyedwards 10y ago

Servo would be more compelling for use with commercial software if had MIT or Apache license. The MPL isn't as bad as GPL but still isn't as generous to the developer as MIT or Apache. With the right license, Servo would be a slam dunk for replacing CEF in commercial software that prohibits reversing or tampering.

metajack 10y ago
The license isn't really up for negotiation, but I'm curious what you think there is to gain with more liberal licensing? All the competing engines are either equivalently or more restrictively licensed, no?

lewisl9029 10y ago

Really looking forward to trying out the browser.html tech preview! Especially since it seems to have native support for a vertical tab layout with autohide!