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Many components from Servo (like WebRender) ended up being useful in Firefox. That alone seems like a pretty reasonable motivation to continue?

• usrnm 2y ago
  No, it doesn't? It shows that Gecko can be updated and modernised without the need for a complete rewrite.
  • ptman 2y ago
    But a rewrite may allow for an overall better architecture.
    • usrnm 2y ago
      Is there anything wrong with Gecko architecture? So wrong that it's a major obstacle and cannot be changed? I don't know anything about its internals or browser engines in general, so I can't really comment on that, but what I do know from practice is that a complete rewrite is a very expensive and a very risky project, that will fail more often than not. There should be very serious arguments behind it, something a lot more serious than the age of the codebase or a new and shiny programming language.
      • cassepipe 2y ago
        It is a very big project and has a big potential for the classic double-free, use-after-free, null-dereferencing, one-off index errors etc. which they designed Rust to get rid of in the first place. I believe they had such a bug some months ago and that it was quite serious.
• dralley 2y ago
  It's a lot easier to swap out the renderer or the CSS engine for a new one than it is the whole core of the browser engine. Mozilla decided that replacing Gecko as-is was not reasonably likely to actually happen, and that further efforts towards Servo would be better made by continuing to evolve Gecko.