CSC/ECE 517 Spring 2015 M1503 EDTS

Extending Developer Tools for Servo

Introduction

Rust

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.<ref>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rust_%28programming_language%29</ref> Being a modern systems programming language focusing on safety and speed, it accomplishes these goals by being memory safe without using garbage collection.<ref>http://doc.rust-lang.org/nightly/intro.html</ref>

Servo

Servo is an experimental project to build a Web browser engine for a new generation of hardware: mobile devices, multi-core processors and high-performance GPUs. With Servo, we are rethinking the browser at every level of the technology stack — from input parsing to page layout to graphics rendering — to optimize for power efficiency and maximum parallelism. Servo builds on top of Rust to provide a secure and reliable foundation. Memory safety at the core of the platform ensures a high degree of assurance in the browser’s trusted computing base. Rust’s lightweight task mechanism also promises to allow fine-grained isolation between browser components, such as tabs and extensions, without the need for expensive runtime protection schemes, like operating system process isolation.<ref>https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/research/projects/</ref>

Background

Remote Developer Tools

Firefox supports remote developer tools - ie. communicating with an arbitrary server that implements a protocol for exposing information about web content. You can use the Firefox developer tools on your desktop to debug Web sites and Web apps running in other browsers or runtimes. The other browser might be on the same device as the tools themselves or on a different device, such as a phone connected over USB.

Architecture

enum

Enums are datatypes with several alternate representations. A simple enum defines one or more constants with the same data type. In Rust, an enum can have complex variants though, like a struct. For example, consider an enum 'Shape' with variants 'Circle' and 'Triangle' each of which is a struct.

   enum Shape {
       Circle { center: Point, radius: f64 },
       Triangle{ vert1: Point, vert2: Point, vert3: Point }
   }

A variable of type Shape can be resolved to its appropriate variant by using a 'match'.

   fn area(sh: Shape) -> f64 {
       match sh {
           Circle(_, size) => f64::consts::PI * size * size,
           Rectangle(Point { x, y }, Point { x: x2, y: y2 }) => (x2 - x) * (y2 - y)
       }
   }

The Servo Developers Tools project has a 'DevtoolsControlMsg' enum which is used to instruct the devtools server to update its known actors/state according to changes in the browser. The current project requires the addition of two new variants to the 'DevtoolsControlMsg' enum, namely 'HTTRequest' and 'HTTResponse'.

Sender<DevtoolsControlMsg>

In Rust, a pipe is used for communication between tasks. A pipe is simply a pair of endpoints: one for sending messages and another for receiving messages(Sender and Receiver). The simplest way to create a pipe is to use the channel function to create a (Sender, Receiver) pair. In Rust parlance, a sender is a sending endpoint of a pipe, and a receiver is the receiving endpoint. A simple channel can be created as follows:

   let (tx, rx) = channel();
   spawn(proc() {
       tx.send(10i);
   });
   assert_eq!(rx.recv(), 10i);

In this project, whenever a HTTPRequest or a HTTPResponse is received, we are going to send a new message using a 'Sender' object that could send variants of the type 'DevtoolsControlMsg'. This 'Sender<DevtoolsControlMsg>' objects sends the messages at appropriate times in the HTTPLoader function.

Design Patterns

Actor Model<ref>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor_model</ref>

The actor model in computer science is a mathematical model of concurrent computation that treats "actors" as the universal primitives of concurrent computation: in response to a message that it receives, an actor can make local decisions, create more actors, send more messages, and determine how to respond to the next message received.

The Actor model adopts the philosophy that everything is an actor. This is similar to the everything is an object philosophy used by some object-oriented programming languages, but differs in that object-oriented software is typically executed sequentially, while the Actor model is inherently concurrent.

An actor is a computational entity that, in response to a message it receives, can concurrently:

• send a finite number of messages to other actors;
• create a finite number of new actors;
• designate the behavior to be used for the next message it receives.

Reference

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