Servo Architecture: Safety and Performance

Jack Moffitt discusses how the Servo browser engine leverages Rust to achieve high performance, parallelism, and safety.

Jack Moffitt linux.conf.au/schedule/presentation/63/ Servo is a browser engine designed for modern hardware written in Rust. Current browsers were designed over a decade ago when phones were not smart, clock speeds were still increasing, and web pages were still static. Taking advantage of modern amenities requires new approaches. Servo's architecture is all about doing many things at once. Taking advantage of multiple cores, GPUs, and SIMD means that Servo can render pages faster. Servo's design also gives it many safety properties not found in other browsers and improves some that you've already been enjoying. I'll discuss how Servo is structured for maximum performance and safety, and how Rust enables many of the things that Servo does. I'll also compare Servo's design with that of existing engines.