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A comment on Firefox is on a slippery slope. Parent comment

Re:Firefox is on a slippery slope by userbinator on Sunday December 17, 2017 @12:23AM (#15944298)
Think of how few complete implementations of C, C++, Python, Java there are.

C++ is at least an order of magnitude more complex, but there have been plenty of C implementations, some even entirely the work of a single person[1]. "I wrote my own C (subset) compiler" seems to be a reasonably common thing on HN too.[2][3][4][5][6][7]

On the other hand, I haven't see very many "truly independent" webpage rendering engine implementations (e.g. HTML4 or HTML5-subset, CSS2.x), so if anyone wants to give it a go (or Go, if you like...), they are more than welcome to, if only to increase the diversity of available implementations --- something that could probably handle HTML4/CSS2 might not be all that difficult, and especially so if you don't care for 100% identical results to the mainstream browsers (which often differ slightly too.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiny_C_Compiler

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13914137

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15463738

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13778353

[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8558822

[6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11903674

[7] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9125912

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Firefox is on a slippery slope by pcwalton on Monday December 18, 2017 @10:38PM (#15957536)
> something that could probably handle HTML4/CSS2 might not be all that difficult

As someone who did a lot of the work to implement a from-scratch HTML4/CSS2 engine, I struggle to come up with words that would adequately express to you just how much you are underestimating the difficulty of this.

[ Parent | on HN ]