Today, we're excited to introduce Gosub, a new open-source browser engine that we are building from the ground up in Rust!
Gosub aims to be a modern, modular, and highly flexible browser engine. While still in the early development and experimentation phase, Gosub is shaping up nicely, and we’re looking to onboard more contributors to help us bring this project to life.
Some of the key highlights:
* Written in Rust: We're leveraging Rust's safety and performance features to create a robust and efficient engine.
* Modular Design: The project is organized around modules, allowing for clean separation of concerns and easier collaboration. It also allows us to easily swap components based on needs and allows more freedom for engine implementers in the future.
* Collaborative and open source: We’re building Gosub with the intention of making it approachable and open to contributions, aiming to create a project that's easier to understand and collaborate on compared to existing browsers.
Instead of writing another shell around Chromium or WebKit, we decided to write a browser engine from scratch. We believe that having a diverse landscape of engines is the only way to defeat a monoculture that is currently threatening current browsers and by extension the internet itself. We cannot and should not let a very small number of large companies dictate the future of the web and its usage.With Gosub, we're aiming to build something more approachable that can evolve with the latest web technologies, all while being open to contributors from day one.
We’re looking for developers with or without experience in Rust. You just need to be interested in browser technologies. There are plenty of opportunities to work on core modules, document our progress, and help shape the project's direction.
We can already render simple pages, including the hackernews front page. However, to render most sites correctly, it is still a long journey, so come and join us!
Why isn't contributing to existing projects like Servo feasible? Do they reject the benefits of modularity?
What existing code is being leveraged, or is this entirely from scratch? Why was lifting code from Servo or elsewhere not sufficient?
Is this project intending to remain fully non-profit or is there some kind of vision for monetization to support the gargantuan amount of effort it would take?
It says writing a javascript engine is out of scope, but it still isn't clear definitively what is in-scope or out of scope.
Obviously we cannot write everything by scratch, but we don't know yet where we draw the line.. We like to keep things modular as possible so we can easily swap out the systems we use in favor of better ones in the future.
I'm fed up with it, so I'm writing a browser - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37608580 - Sept 2023 (477 comments)
> In 1980, Stallman and some other hackers at the AI Lab were refused access to the source code for the software of a newly installed laser printer, the Xerox 9700. ..This experience convinced Stallman of people's need to be able to freely modify the software they use.
And Linux.
> Frustrated by the licensing of Minix, which at the time limited it to educational use only, he began to work on his operating system kernel, which eventually became the Linux kernel.
P.S. the website and the probably AI generated logo is giving a sketchy vibe about the project :)
Might be, or better just use the name as the logo. At this initial stage no one expects to see a good branding I guess.
I've recently seen lots of low effort, sketchy looking projects using "sub-par" quality AI generated assets...and in turn when I see these kinds of images used in some project it really just shows off "put least effort to get things done" mentality...I feel.
Yes, the initial logo design was generated by AI, however the current logo was made by a designer from the AI's draft.
I don't know if it is a compliment that my website design skills match the ones of AI or if it is more an insult
Neither, it has nothing to do with design. I just wanted to point out that putting an AI generated logo, and writing vague statements like "optimised search and unlimited browsing" seems unprofessional to me.
The first half of this post reeks of GPT-ness as well, that was the first thing I noticed.
certainly some reasoning would be more constructive than a smiley face, because I looked at the website, I looked at the logo[0] - I didn't share the same feeling.
Certainly it could be AI generated, but why 'sketchy'? Is it something to do with your own personal feelings on AI use, or just the aesthetic in general?
I genuinely don't understand -- this isn't a criticism or witty comment lest it be taken that way.
“The Gateway to Optimized Search and Unlimited Browsing”
Doesn’t really mean anything to me and does sound vaguely scammy. Anyone promising me the gateway to unlimited anything gets a raised eyebrow, two if it’s something I already have unlimited access to.
I already gave the reasons there.
> I didn't share the same feeling.
Just a personal opinion.
I'm fed up with it, so I'm writing a browser (September 2023): https://adayinthelifeof.nl/2023/09/22/browsers.html
HN discussion at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37608580
Starting your own project you can set the agenda and pace and truly create your vision.
The people who want to do the first idea are very different from the group that want to do the second.
Ok, I'll see myself out now. ;-)
Some examples: https://www.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/124kphe/what_do_y...
There are plenty of browser engines that have fallen by the wayside, often for reasons unrelated to the founders, but that particular list actually paints a surprising amount of the opposite to me. For once since Chrome came out (it at least introduced v8 even if it started with webkit) I have the feeling there are browsers engines in development that can actually attempt to load the modern web and will actually have products for general use cases (instead of specialized ones) in the coming years.
Do we need more "fully compatible" engines? I could imagine there are use cases for browser engines that work with just parts of the specification, particularly the most common ones used in the wild.
The Firefox engine is great if you don't want something controlled by Google. And it's going to be much easier to develop plugins or extensions for that versus trying to write your own browser from scratch, which to be honest will probably cost hundreds of millions of dollars. If not more.
I do imagine tools like this being useful for something like web scraping, but it's never going to be an end user product.
I am reminded of this:
“I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones.”
– Linus Torvalds, announcing the software that became what we now know as Linux
Small things to be noted ( in the small, but noticeable category):
- repeated paragraph ( https://gosub.io/learn-more/ )from 'Gosub started' to 'open and free' - that is it for now:D.. I will be personally watching it with some interest
edit: some grammar
Is anyone working on something like that?
And we plan to allow fine grained configuration of the feature set, so if you don't need certain image formats or layout algorithms or networking support, then you can disable them and save on binary size.
Lateron, we might have some compile time flags to reduce memory usage in cost of a bit of speed. Most Electron apps don't require that big oomf performance on the startup, since everything is locally and can be cached in a better way.
[1]: https://tauri.app [2]: https://syntax.fm/show/821/is-tauri-the-electron-killer/tran...
Contributor: Hey, can we add this? Maintainer: No.
Would parts of Chromium be fundamentally incompatible with these standards?
However, it is not against the rules to launch another process with a static amount of declared memory, then access it over shmat().
This is cheating, but could it be safer?
Well, both that and the ability to work on a project that requires you to run a toolchain whose minimum barrier to entry wrt resource use and developer experience makes the C++ ecosystem that preceded it seem lean and inclusive.
OP is not trying to find a market.
Also if it was written in anything else, it probably wouldn't get the coverage it gets ;)
(Here's to hoping Rust for Linux continues to drive progress for bare metal Rust!)
You may as well ask "why does it matter if this bridge is made of iron".
Each material has its own qualities, which means its own pros and cons in a given context.
This naive belief that there will be one language to rule them all (and is name is <fill-in-the-blank> ignores history and the world outside of programming in a rather silly way.
2) It mattered enough for you to complain about it for some reason, so look at that reason, then look at its reflection.
- Might be interesting to integretors (FFI, dylib, Rust projects)
- Signals some characters: that it's probably safer than alternatives written in non memory safe languages in same class, has good performance
- Might attract contributors (ie I'm sure there's an intersection of people passionate abou the web and Rust)
- This is hacker news, so it might earn a few extra +1s :P
Edit: formatting
A project like this should be under GPL
It would be interesting to be able to use pieces of this from other languages.
The fact that they are writing their own bytestream abstraction does not bode well.
That said, I hope they succeed at shipping something, even if it’s not competitive with Chrome.
My previous thoughts on the topic: Why you can’t build a web browser and why you should anyway.
You want to elaborate on why exactly? Seems like a kind of shallow dismissal, but then I'm no browser engine developer exactly, maybe it's obvious.
Rust has lots of bytestream abstractions already with a ton of work put into them. Maybe they have a valid reason for going their own way. I’d like to know.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/ntvtzq/c...