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by bzbarsky 4874 days ago
We've seen a new layout engine written. Gecko. It took about 15-16 years to get to where it is now, with on average probably ~100 developers. Granted, you can argue it wasn't the most efficient path to get there, but I doubt that you could rebuild Gecko (or WebKit) from scratch today in fewer than 5 years with a team that's about that size...

For that matter, it's not like KHTML sprang out of the void fully-formed; I distinctly recall it being written. Again, the "the path wasn't optimal" arguments may apply.
2 comments
Arelius 4873 days ago
I understand that a new layout engine could be an order of magnitude more work, but I'd like to be optimistic.

The problem I see, is when we start talking about projects that require 100+ men at 5+ years of work, on a project that in particular has no real viable intermediate stages, history seems to suggest to me that it just doesn't get done. The difference with gecko, is it was being advanced with the state of the web, rather than spending 10 years catching up.

A very large part of the problem is that you can't just render part of HTML5 and expect to be in a shipping, and major browser. What do you do with a half done layout engine?

Does a project like Servo really have any hope of completion if that's the case?

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bzbarsky 4873 days ago
That's a really good question. I wish I knew the answer.

Such projects have in fact happened. Windows Vista development started in 2001 and did not finish until end of 2006, with a much larger team than we're talking about here. Of course it's not clear to me that this was _planned_ to take 5 years...

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tmzt 4871 days ago
Ah yes, NGLayout :)

And of course moving from XPCOM to a more direct smart pointer implementation, and various other stages along the way.

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