This Week In Servo 23

This week, we merged 42 pull requests

Work on Windows support has started, in part. We’re tracking progress here, let us know in IRC if you want to help out!

Notable additions

• Ms2ger made some JS safety improvements:
  • Adding the Unrooted<T> JS pointer to be used when we’re holding a pointer to an untraced JS value
  • Avoiding Deref for Root till we get something akin to DerefMove
  • Switching the parser to JS<Node>
• Manish fixed the Gonk build
• Josh added support for firing events from dedicated workers to their corresponding Worker object
• Shing added support for using a hostfile via the $HOST_FILE environment variable

New contributors

• zertyuiop

Screenshots

This is Servo running on the Flame (Firefox OS):

This is running directly on top of Gonk (which is why I can’t take an actual screenshot).

If you have a Flame (or other Firefox OS device) and want to try this out, steps for the build can be found here. Note that the B2G clone and build will take a sizeable amount of space on your machine (~17GB). We’re considering distributing a small prebuilt package with all the headers and libraries, however there might be licensing issues.

If you want to try it out without a build, ask Manishearth in IRC for the binaries (needs a rooted phone. Flames on v188 nightly are rooted by default).

Meeting

Minutes

• Servo’s hiring! Details talk to Jack or Lars if you want to know more
• Rust upgrade: It appears to be that we’re stuck in the state of perpetual rustup.
• We’re going to make all of our dependencies track rustc nightly, to make it easier for others to use (and to make Rust upgrades easier)
• Cookies landed!
• Windows support: A couple of people are interested in working on this, we discussed some issues. More here.
• Async DOM APIs: We’d like to propose some new DOM APIs that call into layout in an asynchronous manner, however we probably don’t have the expertise/people power to do this now.