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If this is ever implemented into Firefox properly, will see the difference in speed or is this mainly focused on security?
by jbrooksuk 13y ago
If this is ever implemented into Firefox properly, will see the difference in speed or is this mainly focused on security?
- paraboul 13y agoIt's a rewrite of the engine from scratch, focused on parallel computing. So yes, it's going to be a massive improvement of speed, security and overall revamping.
- jgraham 13y agoSo, talking about Servo being "implemented into Firefox" might set the wrong expectations. At the moment it is very unclear if or how it will be turned into a consumer-facing product. That said, the goal of Servo is to improve both speed and safety. In terms of speed, part of the project is research into parallel algorithms for various parts of the web stack. For example Servo today has parallel implementations of various parts of CSS. The goal here is to make the sequential performance on par with the best implementations today and then get a further speedup by using multiple cores efficiently. In terms of safety, the choice of Rust over C++ provides substantially stronger compiler-enforced guarantees of memory safety that should help eliminate a large class of bugs that have caused numerous security issues in current browsers. If this sounds interesting there are plenty of ways to get involved; come chat on #servo on Mozilla IRC.
- beagle3 13y agoResponsiveness (commonly defined as time from start of operation to completion) might improve from parallelization. As for "speed" (commonly defined as operations/sec on a given hardware), it will likely be the same or a little lower (parallelism creates overheard). But it's responsiveness that most people measure, and they measure it on machines with CPU utilization in the single digits - in which case, it is likely to improve considerably.