CSC/ECE 517 Fall 2014/oss M1452 jns

Integrating an XML Parser

Servo is an experimental web browser layout engine being developed by Mozilla Research. The prototype seeks to create a highly parallel environment, in which many components (such as rendering, layout, HTML parsing, image decoding, etc.) are handled by fine-grained, isolated tasks. The project has a symbiotic relationship with the Rust programming language, in which it is being developed.

Background Information

Rust

Rust is a systems language for writing high performance applications that are usually written in C or C++ but it was developed to prevent some of the problems related to invalid memory accesses that generate segmentation faults. It covers imperative, functional and object-oriented programming. It's designed to support concurrency and parallelism in building platforms that take full advantage of modern hardware. Its static type system is safe and expressive and it provides strong guarantees about isolation, concurrency execution and memory safety. <ref name=Rust>Overview of Mozilla Research Projects</ref>

Rust combines powerful and flexible modern programming constructs with a clear performance model to make program efficiency predictable and manageable. One important way it achieves this is by allowing fine-grained control over memory allocation through contiguous records and stack allocation. This control is balanced with the absolute requirement of safety: Rust’s type system and runtime guarantee the absence of data races, buffer overflow, stack overflow or access to uninitialized or deallocated memory. <ref name=Rust>Overview of Mozilla Research Projects</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 name=Rust></ref>

References

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