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403 points jaytaph | 4 comments | | HN request time: 0.826s | source

Last year I wrote a post about trying to make a change in the world by writing a browser.

Today, we're excited to introduce Gosub, a new open-source browser engine that we are building from the ground up in Rust!

Gosub aims to be a modern, modular, and highly flexible browser engine. While still in the early development and experimentation phase, Gosub is shaping up nicely, and we’re looking to onboard more contributors to help us bring this project to life.

Some of the key highlights:

  * Written in Rust: We're leveraging Rust's safety and performance features to create a robust and efficient engine.
  * Modular Design: The project is organized around modules, allowing for clean separation of concerns and easier collaboration. It also allows us to easily swap components based on needs and allows more freedom for engine implementers in the future.
  * Collaborative and open source: We’re building Gosub with the intention of making it approachable and open to contributions, aiming to create a project that's easier to understand and collaborate on compared to existing browsers.
Instead of writing another shell around Chromium or WebKit, we decided to write a browser engine from scratch. We believe that having a diverse landscape of engines is the only way to defeat a monoculture that is currently threatening current browsers and by extension the internet itself. We cannot and should not let a very small number of large companies dictate the future of the web and its usage.

With Gosub, we're aiming to build something more approachable that can evolve with the latest web technologies, all while being open to contributors from day one.

We’re looking for developers with or without experience in Rust. You just need to be interested in browser technologies. There are plenty of opportunities to work on core modules, document our progress, and help shape the project's direction.

We can already render simple pages, including the hackernews front page. However, to render most sites correctly, it is still a long journey, so come and join us!

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DoctorOW ◴[] No.41840988[source]
Why not spend this effort contributing to Servo, which is also written in Rust? It seems the two projects share similar goals but Servo has a massive headstart.
replies(2): >>41841571 #>>41845210 #
ipaddr ◴[] No.41845210[source]
Because Servo is run by others with a different agenda that came from a billion dollar company that gets hundreds of millions from a trillion dollar company and they decided to dropped it. The political effort to get to a place where you can shape the project is a huge mountain to climb and unlikely.

Starting your own project you can set the agenda and pace and truly create your vision.

The people who want to do the first idea are very different from the group that want to do the second.

replies(1): >>41845546 #
1. shiroiushi ◴[] No.41845546[source]
Why not fork it then? You don't need to be able to set the agenda for a project if you just fork it and rename it: you can now set the agenda for your fork and ignore the other project, while not having to spend time reinventing the wheel.
replies(1): >>41848799 #
2. fkyoureadthedoc ◴[] No.41848799[source]
As if that wouldn't end up with the same style of "why don't you just" comments?
replies(1): >>41865741 #
3. kentrado ◴[] No.41865741[source]
This is a slippery slope argument.
replies(1): >>41873244 #
4. fkyoureadthedoc ◴[] No.41873244{3}[source]
Me saying there's not a distinction between forking and writing your own project from the "why don't you just" perspective has nothing to do with a slippery slope.