To people wondering why Samsung would join this, I think Samsung is a big believer in the HSA Foundation [1] for heterogeneous computing, and they were one of the first partners in this along with AMD and ARM.

Samsung seems to believe in having the best performing devices and components, so it's not that surprising that they want to be at the forefront of the heterogeneous computing movement.

They also probably see themselves as a competitor against Intel, with both the ARM ISA that they support and the foundry that they own. In the next few years there will be a battle between HSA and Intel's Phi co-processor idea, and I think Samsung is one of the many who wants HSA to succeed (using computing power from all sorts of processors vs using only CPU's for everything).

http://hsafoundation.com

This is a great announcement and adds some much needed support to Servo/Rust. I've been pretty impressed with Samsung too. Clearly they want to have their own seat at the table and they are executing quite well on that desire.

Servo is a "high-risk research project"[1], so I've been wondering what would happen if it doesn't pan out. Rust would still be interesting even without Servo, but would mozilla still invest in Rust if they stopped working on Servo?

So it's nice to see some non-mozilla involvement and momentum in Rust/Servo. Maybe that means that an investment in learning/using Rust is that much less risky :)

[1] http://www.mail-archive.com/dev-servo@lists.mozilla.org/msg0...

This is really exciting. I'm glad to see rust being used for serious apps. This is actually the first new browser engine that I know of being written in the past 10 years.

Good for Mozilla for attempting hard problems in innovative ways.

I am actually surprise this pieces was written by Brendan, given the way Mozilla has been moving lately with asm.js, PDF.js and Shumway which is like Flash.js; It wouldn't be surprise if their Next Goal were to built the Entire ( or Most of ) Browser with Javascript.

I am surprised that Samsung decide to help. Which basically reads to me as relationship with Google is going pretty bad or they are simply hedging their bet.

It was only earlier today I posted that Yahoo should also have a few engineers helping Mozilla to develop Servo.

And i really really hope Servo is licensed like Rust, Dual MIT + Apache 2.0

While this mentions Android, I think the biggest winners in this could be Mozilla and Samsung's own mobile OS's: Firefox OS and Tizen respectively. I'm hoping that if they're collaborating on Servo then the 2 platforms will hopefully become fairly interoperable (in terms of app portability).

Some further details about Servo and Rust can be found here: http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/research/projects/

It's awesome that language design is being promoted as a significant part of this project. Good design from the ground up.

Nice to see Rust gaining traction.

We need to have more safe alternatives for systems programming.

Samsung is really making good use of the hacker community. They hired Cyanogenmod lead dev last year to collab on Android, too.

"X is an attempt to rebuild the Web browser from the ground up on modern hardware, rethinking old assumptions along the way. This means addressing the causes of security vulnerabilities while designing a platform that can fully utilize the performance of tomorrow’s massively parallel hardware to enable new and richer experiences on the Web."

Probably says more about how long I've been around but I think I've read a mostly similar paragraph 5 to 6 times over the last decade.

This will be a big win for faster web apps. DOM performance is the biggest blocker to having a smooth experience in the browser nowadays, not JavaScript speed.

If Google is paying Apple $1B/yr to be the default search engine on iOS, it stands to reason that Samsung could negotiate similar per device rates. That seems like enough potential upside for this to be a no-brainer to me.

I'm no lover of C++, but I'm skeptical that it's really that much more difficult to achieve this design in C++. The parallelism shown is still fairly coarse grained and amenable to traditional techniques. It may be more convenient or less bug prone with Rust, but I read as more substantial, the redesign and rewrite from the ground up. If the redesign was using C/C++, they'd likely get the same benefits, just with uglier code.

Isn't it more likely that lessons learned in Servo will simply be back-ported to C++ in Firefox?

What's in this madness for Samsung?

Any idea when Servo might make it into Firefox desktop builds?