Firefox’s new streaming and tiering compiler

Re:Firefox’s new streaming and tiering compiler by swsieber on Thursday January 18, 2018 @12:24AM (#16174902)

But if you're making your own UI kit, couldn't you just eschew CSS and the like? I was under the impression that part of the reason browser rendering is such a gnarly process is because of the reflow issues that CSS and HTML layout quirks/changes can cause. I would assume that you can implement a couple of layouts that prevent those sort of pitfalls and thus speed up rendering...

Please correct me (you know a lot, and I'm betting some of my assumptions are wrong).

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Re:Firefox’s new streaming and tiering compiler by pcwalton on Thursday January 18, 2018 @02:26AM (#16175347)

Sure, you could get rid of CSS, but in favor of what? You probably need something just like flexbox, and it's not easy to beat an optimized implementation of CSS flexbox in terms of layout performance (especially if parallelized). You could eliminate the restyling step by not having cascading and selector matching, but that hurts productivity and maintainability, which is why you see frameworks like GTK+ moving toward CSS-like styling. There's no free lunch here...

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