These days, Rust is used for all kinds of things. But its founding application was Servo, an experimental browser engine.
Now, after years of effort, a major part of Servo is shipping in production: Mozilla is releasing Firefox Quantum!
Rust code began shipping in Firefox earlier this year, starting with relatively small pilot projects like an MP4 metadata parser to replace some uses of libstagefright. These components performed well and caused effectively no crashes, but browser development had yet to see large benefits from the full power Rust could offer. This changes today.
Stylo: a parallel CSS engine
Firefox Quantum includes Stylo, a pure-Rust CSS engine that makes full use of Rust’s “Fearless Concurrency” to speed up page styling. It’s the first major component of Servo to be integrated with Firefox, and is a major milestone for Servo, Firefox, and Rust. It replaces approximately 160,000 lines of C++ with 85,000 lines of Rust.
When a browser is loading a web page, it looks at the CSS and parses the rules. It then determines which rules apply to which elements and their precedence, and “cascades” these down the DOM tree, computing the final style for each element. Styling is a top-down process: you need to know the style of a parent to calculate the styles of its children, but the styles of its children can be calculated independently thereafter.
This top-down structure is ripe for parallelism; however, since styling is a complex process, it’s hard to get right. Mozilla made two previous attempts to parallelize its style system in C++, and both of them failed. But Rust’s fearless concurrency has made parallelism practical! We use rayon ---one of the hundreds of crates Servo uses from Rust’s ecosystem — to drive a work-stealing cascade algorithm. You can read more about that in Lin Clark’s post. Parallelism leads to a lot of performance improvements, including a 30% page load speedup for Amazon’s homepage.
Wrapping up
Overall, Firefox Quantum benefits significantly from Stylo, and thus from Rust. Not only does it speed up page load, but it also speeds up interaction times since styling information can be recalculated much faster, making the entire experience smoother.
But Stylo is only the beginning. There are two major Rust integrations getting close to the end of the pipeline. One is integrating Webrender into Firefox; Webrender heavily uses the GPU to speed up rendering. Another is Pathfinder, a project that offloads font rendering to the GPU. And beyond those, there remains Servo’s parallel layout and DOM work, which are continuing to grow and improve. Firefox has a very bright future ahead.
As a Rust team member, I’m really happy to see Rust being successfully used in production to such great effect! As a Servo and Stylo developer, I’m grateful to the tools Rust gave us to be able to pull this off, and I’m happy to see a large component of Servo finally make its way to users!
Experience the benefits of Rust yourself --- try out Firefox Quantum!
Read the full article:
https://blog.rust-lang.org/2017/11/14/Fearless-Concurrency-In-Firefox-Quantum.html