[Arelius]

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?

[bzbarsky]

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...