cc-rs VS Servo

It does support calling into other compilers and toolchains through build scripts and such. Take cc-rs[0] for example: this allows building C and C++ files natively without even calling an executable yourself.

In practice, I'd expect libraries to just call make/cmake/ninja for you, or (like openssl-sys) ask you to install the necessary libraries using your favourite package manager.

[0]: https://github.com/rust-lang/cc-rs

The cc crate (https://github.com/rust-lang/cc-rs) is widely used for compiling C code from Rust (often in a build.rs file for the purpose of wrapping a C library so that it can be used from Rust). However, I believe it generally does expect a C compiler to be present.

It might be quite tedious to compile static library manually every time we make changes in C code. The better solution is to instead utilize the cc crate, which provides an idiomatic Rust interface to the compiler provided by the host.

https://github.com/alexcrichton/cc-rs This crates lets you shell out to a C compiler when building your Rust project

> You're splitting hairs in a weird way. rustc cannot compile C code. zig can.

But why do I care? I don't use rustc directly, the build system of choice does. And very few of the major build systems have an issue handling multiple languages.

Cargo (rust's build system) supports build scripts and the community has already created C/C++ compiler hooks such as https://github.com/alexcrichton/cc-rs

rustup and cargo also provide easy cross-compilation support, too.

I think it's getting confused because link.exe is in your PATH. But it's not the link.exe it expects. Link tools are detected using the cc crate so it would need to be fixed there. Would you be willing to open an issue about this?

It’s not super well-documented, but there is an option to change this. --remap-path-prefix $(pwd)= in your RUSTFLAGS will usually do the trick. If you have any C dependencies you’ll also need similar things in CFLAGS, see https://github.com/alexcrichton/cc-rs/issues/593

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

It won't don't worry. There already are forks, for the worst case scenario. And Servo is on its way. Not yet ready, but it will be. Originally, from Mozilla kitchen.

To pain broad strokes, the layout phase (~= take the HTML, take the CSS, determine the position and size of boxes) is largely sequential in production browser engine today. Selector matching (~= what CSS applies to what element) is parallel in Firefox today, via the Stylo Rust crate originally developed in the research browser engine Servo. Servo can do parallel layout in some capacity (but doesn't implement everything), https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Servo-Layout-Engines-Rep... is an interesting and recent document on the matter.

Parallel layout is generally considered to be a complex engineering problem by domain experts.

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/08/inside-a-super-fast-css-en... is a really cool article that is related, that is a few years old but what it says is largely correct today.