There are some questions around Servo as a result of the announcement, so I just wanted to jump in and talk a bit more about what’s going on. tl;dr - Servo is Mozilla’s vehicle for web engine research, and continues to be a major source of new tech for Firefox. But we’re also adding a more direct path to product for Mixed Reality.
Servo has produced lots of great browser tech. We're seeing that tech make its way into Firefox with Stylo and the Quantum release, and there's on-going work to bring even more tech into Firefox, like the WebRender work that you can try out in the latest nighlies. Servo's goal is to create the best technology for working with both current and upcoming web standards, which means collaborating with multiple product teams, from Firefox to Mixed Reality to other, future explorations.
There’s still a long road to full compatibility with the existing web in all of Servo’s components, and it will take time to get there. In the meantime, though, there are emerging technologies where Mozilla believes it is vital for the open web to play a central role. One of these is Mixed Reality (which refers to both Virtual and Augmented Reality), a space that’s getting a ton of attention from all of today’s tech giants.
Mixed Reality is interesting for Servo in two different respects. First, it’s a huge opportunity: it’s early days and content is brand new, so there’s no long tail of web compat to worry about; we can get products built on Servo to market relatively quickly. By putting open web tech on the cutting edge, Mozilla can help ensure that Mixed Reality doesn’t become yet another siloed technology.
But second, the constraints of Mixed Reality will help us push Servo technology to the limit: we need to achieve 75 or 90 frames per second per eye to make a workable product. The research advances here will pay huge dividends back in traditional browser engines like Firefox.
In short, this is a “yes, and” shift. Servo continues to be about building the best browser tech, period, for use across Mozilla’s products. The increased emphasis on Mixed Reality represents an opportunity to push that tech further, sooner. And the organizational change within Mozilla Research reflects a closer collaboration between the teams needed to make that happen.
We're considering moving the new Rust language service over to this protocol, or possibly, having it as a default protocol while supporting other protocols.
Since I've been learning it recently, maybe some points to help understand it:
It's just the protocol piece. Currently, VSCode will stand up the language server and communicate using the protocol over stdin/stdout. Nothing to say they couldn't support http servers in the future, but currently it seems lower level that that.
They do support hovers, which you can use for seemingly anything. We currently are using them for type information and showing API docs.
I'm hoping this takes on with other editors, as once they support it, then they'll get the stronger language support the servers provide, which can do hovers, on-the-fly error checking, code navigation, and more. It's not perfect, but as a baseline set of features, it's a pretty good starting set.
Hi all - thanks for the interest in the survey! The Rust community team is still working the blog post (this link was to an early draft), and we're looking forward to posting it when it's done.