Servo Layout Engine: Parallelizing the Browser [video]
Mozilla is one of my favorite tech companies. Servo is a great example: Mozilla is willing to engage in fundamental CS research. Not only are they trying to put together a parallel, secure browser engine <i>from the ground up</i>, but they even created Rust to do so. This is truly long-term work, which seems rare in an increasingly short-term world.<p>And Rust isn't just another C clone with OOP or CSP bolted on: it's principled, relatively elegant and takes full advantage of the last few decades of PL research. All while being practical—it has to be, since it's evolved with a Servo as a concomitant project. A non-trivial companion project like that seems great for naturally guiding a language! Not many other languages can say any of this, much less ones actually poised to replace C++ or at least do <i>actual</i> systems programming.<p>And Mozilla is doing all this in a completely open and transparent way. I think this is incredibly important: anybody can get a glimpse into active development or even contribute. Just go to the relevant GitHub repo[1][2] and you're set. This is the way open source is supposed to work, rather than having companies develop behind close doors and dump source code occasionally (although that's also better than nothing).<p>I really wish more companies would take this sort of approach with their open source or basic research work. This gives me more confidence in Servo, Rust and Mozilla as a whole, especially compared to many of Mozilla's competitors (both in the browser space and in programming languages).<p>[1]: <a href="https://github.com/mozilla/servo/" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/mozilla/servo/</a>    [2]: <a href="https://github.com/mozilla/rust" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/mozilla/rust</a>