What does HackerNews think of webrender?

A GPU-based renderer for the web

Language: Rust

> Maybe. Gtk and its related libraries don’t cover everything Qt does

And therein lies the problem. Qt is semi-open (the parent company tried to close source it[1]). If a commercial company has no interest in maintaining it, there is even less hope for other open source approaches.

Best cross OS system are almost always backed by a commercial supporter. See Skia - Google, Java Swing - Oracle, Qt - QtCompany, etc.

OSS offerings were always runner ups (e.g. Gtk - Gnome).

> The memory model of Rust is still whatever C++ does. I get that Rust has some nice features and C++ makes it easy to fuck your self but people have been doing large scale parallel software development for years in C++.

Memory model of Rust is undefined[2]. It might be anything Rust does to accomodate C++ bindings, but I don't think they really settled on one.

I'd like to add - people have been doing large scale parallel software development for years in C++, in spite of C++. What is a line of comment in C++ in Rust is a type system constraint.

It's a difference between having a seatbelt (Rust) and holding a piece of seatbelt (C++).

Rust was literally made to address C++ shortcomings when it comes to parallelism.

> You mean like QtQuick/QML, skia (basically this is the effective underpinning of electron and flutter) or Dear Imgui, etc. There are a handful of widely used GPU based GUI libraries. The above examples are all C++.

No. I mean like WebRenderer[3], Lyon[4]. Most things should be parallelized and done on GPU/SIMD. Layout, font shaping, etc.

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25656932

[2]https://doc.rust-lang.org/reference/memory-model.html

[3]https://github.com/servo/webrender

[4]https://docs.rs/lyon/latest/lyon/

Yes! This is because web browsers use the platform text input stack

Browsers are actually a great example of my favorite approach to cross-platform UI, because they sprinkle platform-native widgets throughout the canvas that they render, controlled by a platform-agnostic programming language. Which reminds me that people were trying to use webrender[1] to build native apps in Rust.

[1] https://github.com/servo/webrender

Firefox uses the GPU via WebRender[0]. I don't know what specific things it's used for, but I'm pretty sure it's not any of the DOM parsing. The GPU is used for the actual graphical rendering down the line -- compositing and such[1].

[0] https://github.com/servo/webrender

[1] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/10/the-whole-web-at-maximum-f...