servonk VS serenity

Servo has always been easy to embed. Basically the host needs to provide a GL surface and input events, and gets some callbacks from Servo.

Maybe I should revive the Gonk port[0]...

[0] https://github.com/fabricedesre/servonk/

Servo produced a very fast CSS rules matching engine now used in Firefox (see https://nolanlawson.com/2022/06/22/style-scoping-versus-shad...), and WebRender which underpins Gecko's rendering. That's not nothing.

About embedding Servo, I have some experience around that (https://github.com/fabricedesre/servonk/) and it's been easy to embed: you just need to provide a GL surface and hook up your input events into their event loop. Clearly there were not zero integration points, and a some other examples exist (like https://github.com/paulrouget/servoshell).

SerenityOS replicates that look and feel. It is also implemented in a dialect of C++ that adheres to some of the good parts of C++98: https://serenityos.org

One example of a useful technique

https://serenityos.org/ apparently only makes source code available. There are no binary images of the OS to install

I think Andreas said this functions like a little test -- if you're not willing to build it from source, then you probably wouldn't be a good contributor anyway.

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Likewise, my shell project provides source tarballs only, right now - https://www.oilshell.org/release/0.21.0/

It is packaged in a number of places, which I appreciate. That means some other people are willing to do some work.

And they provide good feedback.

I would like it to be more widely available, but yeah I definitely see that you need to "gate" peanut gallery feedback a bit, because it takes up a lot of time.

Of course, it's a tricky balance, because you also want feedback from casual users, to make the project better.

Indeed, given the existence of `JS::NonnullGCPtr`, `JS::GcPtr` intentionally corresponds to a nullable pointer, so it seems dangerous to convert one to a reference without a null-check.

That said, a naive code search finds what *may* be more cases of this pattern:

https://github.com/search?q=repo%3ASerenityOS%2Fserenity+%2F...

Eg: https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/blob/a68b134e6dea5065... -> https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/blob/a68b134e6dea5065...

In some of those search results, it is fine because there is a preceding null-check, and obviously I know nothing about this code other than this naive search result, but perhaps it would be prudent to vet all of them.

It is a SerenityOS project. You can find the answer to that question in their primary project's FAQ[1].

1. https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/blob/master/Documenta...

https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity

The best way to write proper exception free C++ is not to use the C++ Standard Library.

I initially confused it with Serenity OS prior to watching the video: https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity

My contributions to SerenityOS[0] helped me get my current job. My team lead (who was also my interviewer) was interested in what I did since I listed some of it in my CV, and I showed him some PRs I made and explained what went into each of them. It was really exciting because I didn't have professional experience with low-level development, and basically got the job due to hobby programming.

[0]: https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/pulls?q=is%3Apr+autho...

Definitely not "literally impossible", just a great deal of work. https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/tree/master/Ladybird