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Trying Out the Servo Browser Engine

28 Sep, 2016

I've been following the development of the Rust language a little bit this year. If I'm honest I've found the official book quite hard work, but David Raznick tipped me off to an O'Reilly book on Rust currently in development. Since I subscribe to Safari, I've been able to read it already.

The two most exciting features of Rust are:

It is designed to be safe - this means it is impossible to have pointers to memory that has been freed, or race conditions amongst threads
its output is compatible with C so it is easy to link Rust output with other libraries, or use Rust output from languages that make it easy to work with C libraries

The language was invented by Mozilla for a new browser engine they are writing called Servo, so I thought I'd give it a go.

Here are the steps on a recent OS X:

brew install rust
brew install automake pkg-config python cmake
pip install virtualenv
brew install openssl
export OPENSSL_INCLUDE_DIR="$(brew --prefix openssl)/include"
export OPENSSL_LIB_DIR="$(brew --prefix openssl)/lib"
git clone https://github.com/servo/servo
cd servo
./mach build -r
./mach run -r --browserhtml

This all takes a long time to build, but it did so flawlessly for me.

Here's the result of visiting jimmyg.org:

As you can see there is quite a lot working here including JavaScript and CSS. The things that seem pretty broken are CSS floats and clear: both. Overall though I'm really excited to see the progress.