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This is a misunderstanding of what a rendering engine does. It operates on at least two layers: 1. On the CPU, architecting the drawing commands and resource m

This is a misunderstanding of what a rendering engine does. It operates on at least two layers: 1. On the CPU, architecting the drawing commands and resource management for the GPU 2. GPU programs (in the form of API calls, shaders, output buffers, etc.) Generally speaking, part 1 is not the resource-intensive part unless you also have to run an intensive algorithm on the CPU. If you see the renderer as a synthesizer unit, the CPU is the number of user parameters you have - the number of knobs and switches and sliders and patch points. You would typically only have a few knobs to turn, if you were writing a custom renderer for your application. But a complex, general-purpose renderer like that of the HTML DOM is more like a wall of patch cables; and within that, the Servo renderer found opportunities to make "risky" optimizations that parallelize, make tighter use of memory, etc., but many of them are only reasonable to do from within Rust, because of the additional checks it can perform.

Manishearth 10y ago
It's more than just architecting the drawing commands and resource management. That's just the renderer. The term "rendering engine" is misleading; in the context of browsers the rendering engine does basically all the core browser tasks. Basically, all the stuff needed to make a web page _work_ is part of the rendering engine. Stuff like history, bookmarks, URL bar, is part of the rest of the browser. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13331505 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13331505 Servo's usage of Rust is all for the rest of the stuff. We do have a component, http://github.com/servo/webrender/ http://github.com/servo/webrender/, which handles rendering in particular. That indeed does the architecting of the draw commands and resource management on the CPU, and has a bunch of shaders handling everything else.

Manishearth 10y ago

It's more than just architecting the drawing commands and resource management. That's just the renderer. The term "rendering engine" is misleading; in the context of browsers the rendering engine does basically all the core browser tasks. Basically, all the stuff needed to make a web page _work_ is part of the rendering engine. Stuff like history, bookmarks, URL bar, is part of the rest of the browser. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13331505 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13331505 Servo's usage of Rust is all for the rest of the stuff. We do have a component, http://github.com/servo/webrender/ http://github.com/servo/webrender/, which handles rendering in particular. That indeed does the architecting of the draw commands and resource management on the CPU, and has a bunch of shaders handling everything else.