Gosub – An open-source browser engine (opens in new tab)

Good points.. we will definitely set up a FAQ with these kind of questions. But to be honest, we might not have an answer for all of them. Why not use Servo's CSS system and create our own, but using v8 javascript engine is mostly a question answered by: "don't know"..

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.

We actually kind of have a javascript engine. It is a more personal project of mine, but it is also intended to be used and intigrated into gosub. In case someone is interested, here is the repo: https://github.com/Sharktheone/yavashark

They say BASIC programmers never die, the just GOSUB and never RETURN.

For some reason your comment made me think about computed gosubs - pretty sure I've managed to forget about those for ~40 years!

lol GOSUB as a BASIC command, yes I can see the reference. It actually referes to the BASIC command.

It's a great name!

how to introduce progress into civilisation? Just make some devoted engineer angry

Isn't this how generative models are supposed to be used? Instead of generating a sub-par (no pun intended) logo myself, I get a model to build one for me. It is the same as using any computer software to achieve the goal - human is providing the inputs and hardware and software are generating the output.

No, the website isn't AI generated. There might be some parts of it, though, like general structure of the website and structure of texts.

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

> P.S. the website and the probably AI generated logo is giving a sketchy vibe about the project :)

The first half of this post reeks of GPT-ness as well, that was the first thing I noticed.

>P.S. the website and the probably AI generated logo is giving a sketchy vibe about the project :)

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.

[0]: https://gosub.io/gosub-logo.svg

The viewport is very wide on mobile Safari

Because Servo is run by others with a different agenda that came from a billion dollar company that gets hundreds of millions from a trillion dollar company and they decided to dropped it. The political effort to get to a place where you can shape the project is a huge mountain to climb and unlikely.

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.

people really need to take a democratic vote on what they do in their free time, it's getting ridiculous, some of them are even having fun now!

Personally, it reminded me of BASIC, not go.

Someone else should write a browser engine called “Godom”. Which honestly would be a great name. A good browser will handle sessions and DOM.

The name gosub reminds me of the BASIC command, and at first I was expecting it to be written in FreeBASIC or some other BASIC dialect.

Gosub is kind of an acronym. I don't really like it, but yeah Gosub and go would be more similar than to Rust

Servo and Ladybird are more active than ever, each having fresh funding and ramping up focused development. Flow is a commercial project for embedded media devices (not just available on rpi, it actually came there later) and seems to be doing well? Sciter I don't know one way or the other about, it seems to have a few popular apps using it but I don't know if it died off since then or is just going strong. Netsurf has always been a bit by the wayside but it doesn't seem like founders getting exhausted has much to do with that.

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.

All I have to do is stumble upon a heated 100+ post discussion on the implementation details of an arcane feature of CSS to understand how mammoth an undertaking it must be to develop a fully compatible browser engine.

The various web specifications are insanely complex (e.g. navigables) so I can see how people burn out from it. To add onto that, a browser operates in an extremely hostile space security wise; to be a serious competitor, you'll need to be on top of your game in that regard which maybe Rust will help with.

Honestly, I view projects like this as more of an intellectual curiosity than anything which seeks to become useful .

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 think I fixed this a while ago, but we didn't update the website deployment

Yes, we're working on that over at https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz (alpha release imminent). Our TodoMVC example is current ~20mb with a standard release builds, but comes down to 7.2mb with some compiler flags like -Oz and LTO enabled (these numbers of from macOS).

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.

Well, the application is basically unoptimized. However, we also don't have many components yet that can eat up your memory. But we try to keep the memory usage as low as possible. We also thought about integrating it into something like Electron, and for something like that it is important to have a low memory usage.

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.

The smallest app built with Tauri is 500 KB.

[1]: https://tauri.app [2]: https://syntax.fm/show/821/is-tauri-the-electron-killer/tran...

There is Sciter: https://gitlab.com/sciter-engine/sciter-js-sdk

That's now one of the goal of Servo. Also, did you look at Tauri?

Right? I don't think HN needs more obligatory "this is a big undertaking and likely to fail" comments. We can take those as implied. We should 1) engage more meaningfully with the project and 2) keep in mind that negativity hurts a lot more than positivity helps. If you're not up to the task, fine, and maybe they aren't either, but don't drag them down before they've tried.

I suspect people who post these whys haven't actually tried that.

Contributor: Hey, can we add this? Maintainer: No.

Yes I have. But not this.

Sounds very hard. For example, Rule 21.3 in MISRA C 2012 basically prohibits dynamic memory allocation (e.g. malloc, calloc, realloc, free). Implementing a browser with such restrictions would be quite misrable.

I would think the MISRA rules against dynamic memory allocation would present serious difficulty if not fundamental incompatibility when trying to implement web standards.

No.

"GOSUB" is the syntax used to call subroutines (functions) in BASIC:

http://retro-basic.com/manual/GOSUB.html

Then they'd have to use Ruby

There is always room for the go version as GoSub-go /s

> there is a market

OP is not trying to find a market.

Rust gives you the performance of C++ if not better sometimes, with code that won't go haywire at the 11th hour. There is value in that, particularly in an application that's sole purpose is to load arbitrary stuff from the internet.

Also if it was written in anything else, it probably wouldn't get the coverage it gets ;)

Rust was invented to make it easier to write a secure, performant browser engine

Projects written in Rust tend to be very fast - as fast as C++ or C code - but without the endless security issues.

You may as well ask "why does it matter if this bridge is made of iron".

1) I suspect that it's important for potential contributors to know what language it's written in.

2) It mattered enough for you to complain about it for some reason, so look at that reason, then look at its reflection.

A few thing from the top of my head:

- 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

I highly doubt that. At least not in a native way. However, you could make an adapter from the native interface to wasm components. Would be interesting to look into!

The byte stream is one of the first components that was written. Probably It wouldn't be written nowadays. The browser is quite modular, so in the end you can completely out out of that system.

> The fact that they are writing their own bytestream abstraction does not bode well.

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.

There are people who write their own hash tables, and there are those who just use a library. What may seem like a bad idea to some is trivial to others. Hacker culture is way more fun when you are allowed to use recursion [1].

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/ntvtzq/c...

It looks like, this is the wrong link. I think you meant https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37608580