Adventures in Rust (part 1)

Over the past few months, I have become interested in web browser internals. This mostly happened by fixing issues reported on the Mozilla Servo project earlier this year. It is a really interesting project for many reasons.

Servo is Mozilla’s new experimental browser layout engine written in Rust. Its main focus is on increasing security and performance of browsers especially as browsers start using more parallelism due to the increasing amount of cores in modern processors and face more security bugs due to being written in languages such as C++. Rust is perfect for this use case and has been shown to be almost equivalent in performance to languages with manual memory management.

The Project

The point of this series is to detail my work on a feature during which I will try to provide commentary into software development in Rust, browser internals, and open source development.

The feature that I will be trying to implement is sequential focus navigation. In other words, navigation using the keyboard. Quite commonly, this is done using the TAB and SHIFT + TAB keys.

This feature is quite useful for people who browse the web with a keyboard who like to quickly navigate a form or a page.

Initial Progress

For a while, I struggled with Rust’s borrow checker, due to Rust’s model of ownership. Slowly though, I seem to be getting a understanding of how it works. The Rust book has great examples for learning these aspects of the language.

So far, the basics are in place. The Document object is handling key events and a vector was created that holds the elements that are sequentially focusable.

The next step is to get navigation with Shift and Shift+Tab working.

Until next time.