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An anonymous coward writes:
"Mozilla is using work on it's next generation layout engine, Servo, to fine tune a new language used for writing that layout engine. The new language, called Rust, started as a personal project of Greydon Hoare and has since grown to be sponsored by Mozilla and Samsung. From the article:
The Rust language will power Mozilla's new browser, Servo, and its big selling point is efficiency. Because C++ crashes when it runs into memory allocation issues, it weakens any browser that uses the language. Mozilla designed Rust to be superior to C++ this way, more easily isolating tasks and promote a process known as "work stealing," which is when tasks from an overloaded processor are shifted over to another one.
Rust is a general purpose, multi-paradigm, compiled programming language developed by Mozilla Research. It is designed to be a "safe, concurrent, practical language", supporting pure-functional, concurrent-actor, imperative-procedural, and object-oriented styles."
(Score: 0) by Angry Jesus on Monday March 17 2014, @04:11PM
> The NS3 engine itself was vastly faster -- which was obvious once NS4 came out
Everyone knows NS4 was a clusterfuck, which means comparing NS3 to NS4 as a means to say thing about modern firefox is cherry-picking.
Still, you are missing the point - modern firefox implements orders of magnitude more functionality than NS3. Any comparison of speeds on "complex html" is to beg the question because NS3 can't do complex html. The price for additional functionality is additional memory and cpu.
> 102.50 MB -- heap-unallocated
I don't even see heap-unallocated in 27.0.1, are you running an old version of firefox?
> "less verbose" to "more verbose" consistently uses about 9mb. To display about 30 more lines of text. :(
I get 2MB difference and when I cut-n-paste the text on the page into wc, regular has 248 lines, verbose has 4,371 lines.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Monday March 17 2014, @04:45PM
SeaMonkey v2.5 at the moment. I tend not to upgrade unless I have to, because the next version is invariably worse in some way either annoying or critical. :( I don't use Firefox at all, because it makes me want to kill the developers. (If forced by some cranky site, I'll use PaleMoon, but not for everyday.)
And verbose wasn't much more in my case, but I had very little going on at that instant.
See, there's the point I was making -- NS4 was indeed a clusterfuck, yet in its early stages it did very little more than NS3. Just did it massively slower. Sometimes a total code rewrite is NOT a good thing.
Incidentally, Abrash's old book is now available online (it's been a freebie for years, I think I got it with his Black Book):
http://www.jagregory.com/abrash-zen-of-asm/ [jagregory.com]
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Angry Jesus on Monday March 17 2014, @05:07PM
That's odd, I thought your point was that firefox is a pointless memory hog and when required to drill down to the actual reasoning and evidence behind that point, it turned out to be technical innuendo.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Monday March 17 2014, @05:21PM
Dunno how you concluded that, but whatever.
Read Abrash's Black Book, it'll give you some insights.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.