ORCSolver-CHI2020 VS Servo

Layout engines are difficult to write and adapt. Especially adapt as they're so complicated.

I read part of the ORC Solver paper and there is algorithms in that paper for writing a layout engine and there's code on GitHub.

https://github.com/YueJiang-nj/ORCSolver-CHI2020

I would like to adapt this approach but write the code myself but it is obviously a challenging area.

I am yet to write a branch and bound optimisation algorithm. But from my understanding you greedily try a number of rows or columns and try arrange objects preferred width and preferred height into the space available. ORCSolver uses intervals and eliminates attempts that are not viable. ORCSolver uses Z3 for the final step to actually get coordinates when the system has been constrained. I plan to use ORTools.

For simplicity I plan to break up text into letters and try place them all in a flowing horizontal then vertical layout. I can use GetTextExtents of WX widgets to predict size of a rendered letter. It shall be slow but then how else do you begin writing a layout engine? I would need to read TeX or the Art of Computer Programming.

Layout is expensive especially for grid based layouts with flowing. I wonder if website authors could prerender at different resolutions and provide start point sizes and coordinates for speed. Generally everybody reaches the same numbers on everyone's machines and we don't need to try a lot of aborted work to relayout.

I am the author of additive GUIs which is a declarative rendering approach for bootstrap layouts. https://GitHub.com/samsquire/additive-guis

Actually Servo development has accelerated greatly since 2023: https://github.com/servo/servo/graphs/contributors

https://servo.org/ is seeing new development alongside https://tauri.app/ which seems like it could replace Electron, getting them a little closer to native speed and memory usage.

It'd be nice to see more and more of Servo integrated into Firefox. Web pages rendered at 120fps and fewer memory leaks in long-lived many-tabbed browser sessions would be lovely.

Servo, the embeddable, independent, memory-safe, modular, parallel web rendering engine

> Is there any easy to use/hack HTML layouting engine where I could experiment with custom CSS attributes and bridge that gap? Would anything from Servo be suitable?

Servo could be used for this. You'd want to add support for parsing the CSS properties themselves to the style crate in https://github.com/servo/stylo and then the layout implementation to the layout2020 crate in https://github.com/servo/servo. You do effectively get a whole browser though.

I'm currently working on building a lighter weight / hackable layout engine based on a combination of https://github.com/servo/stylo (for css parsing and selector resolution), https://github.com/DioxusLabs/taffy (for box-level layout) and https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-text (for flow/inline layout). I expect to have something decent in around 6 months

Neither of these setups currently have any support for pagination though.

Great to see some competition still alive in browser engine development. See also Servo (previously part of Mozilla) https://servo.org/ - that and Ladybird are still very underdeveloped compared to every day browsers.

It's a huge shame that there are no nightly builds of ladybird to try out but I assume that's because they just don't want the bug reports (if everything doesn't work it's pointless getting random bugs filed).

I haven't messed with it yet but from looking into it, this should absolutely work.

https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Building-on-ARM-desktop-...

don't know, there was a downtime in 2021 and 22 but since 2023, contributions look back to where it was before .. https://github.com/servo/servo/graphs/contributors

The world has moved on though to opinionated tools, and Rust isn't even the furthest in that direction (That would be Go). The equivalent of those two lines in Cargo.toml would be this example of a basic configuration from the jacoco-maven-plugin: https://www.jacoco.org/jacoco/trunk/doc/examples/build/pom.x... - That's 40 lines in the section to do the "defaults".

Yes, you could add a load of config for files to include/exclude from coverage and so on, but the idea that that's a norm is way more common in Java projects than other languages. Like here's some example Cargo.toml files from complicated Rust projects:

Servo: https://github.com/servo/servo/blob/main/Cargo.toml

rust-gdext: https://github.com/godot-rust/gdext/blob/master/godot-core/C...

ripgrep: https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep/blob/master/Cargo.toml

socketio: https://github.com/1c3t3a/rust-socketio/blob/main/socketio/C...

1. Servo