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Show HN: Vaev – A browser engine built from scratch (It renders google.com)

(github.com)
233 points monax | 1 comments | 18 May 25 17:54 UTC | HN request time: 0.241s | source

We’ve been working on Vaev, a minimal web browser engine built from scratch. It supports HTML/XHTML, the CSS cascade, @page rules for pagination, and print-to-PDF rendering. It even handles calc(), var(), and percentage units—and yes, it renders Google.com (mostly).

This is an experimental project focused on learning and exploration. Networking is basic (http:// and file:// only), and grid layouts aren’t supported yet, but we’re making progress fast.

We’d love your thoughts and feedback.

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danpalmer ◴[19 May 25 01:15 UTC] No.44025713[source]▶
I'm interested in why C++ was chosen for this? Browsers are notoriously hard to secure, they're effectively mean to be RCE vulnerabilities! Securing C++ binaries is hard and has in recent years been called out by numerous organisations and companies as being the root cause of many classes of security vulnerability. With languages like (but not limited to) Rust, we now have better options.
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1. norman784 ◴[19 May 25 07:32 UTC] No.44027326[source]▶
AFAIK Rust isn't a great language for writing browsers, because the pattern that HTML/DOM needs isn't something that Rust supports out of the box, you need a lot of pointers here and there, IIRC Andreas Kling (Ladybird dev) said something like that, where Swift was better suited than Rust for the job, or at least more pleasant to work with after the team evaluated a few languages, including Rust.