Servo Architecture: Safety and Performance

Presented by Jack Moffitt
Wednesday 10:40 a.m.–11:25 a.m.
Target audience: Developer

Abstract

Servo is a browser engine designed for modern hardware written in Rust. Current browsers were designed over a decade ago when phones were not smart, clock speeds were still increasing, and web pages were still static. Taking advantage of modern amenities requires new approaches.

Servo's architecture is all about doing many things at once. Taking advantage of multiple cores, GPUs, and SIMD means that Servo can render pages faster. Servo's design also gives it many safety properties not found in other browsers and improves some that you've already been enjoying.

I'll discuss how Servo is structured for maximum performance and safety, and how Rust enables many of the things that Servo does. I'll also compare Servo's design with that of existing engines.

Presented by

Jack Moffitt

Jack Moffitt is a Senior Research Engineering Manager at Mozilla. He leads the Servo project which aims to build a next generation browser focusing on parallelism and safety. Previously to Mozilla he founded and worked at several startups working on real-time search, XMPP, multiplayer games, and internet radio. He has been created and been involved in a number of open source and free software projects including Icecast, the Ogg Vorbis and Daala codecs, and the Strophe XMPP libraries.

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