I was really hoping this article would be about how Mozilla decided to write a new, awesome RegExp library written in Rust that implemented the ECMAScript standard. I guess it makes sense to re-use Irregexp, since it’s already written and optimized…
Well if they were going in that direction, I would hope they would have used the already-existing Rust Rexexp library, and added any features needed to make it do the job.
It’s cool that they were able to collaborate so smoothly with the V8 team to get the whole thing working better for everyone. But on the other hand, I wonder how concerned I should be that more and more of the infrastructure of web browsers, and therefore the effective definition of the web itself, seems to be converging into a single codebase.
Thankfully, WebKit still maintains a different regular expression engine than Blink. It happens to be the same YARR which Gecko abandoned in favor of Irregexp.
You should be very concerned. Monocultures don’t make things “better for everyone,” they subvert standards, stifle innovation, and restrict your freedom of choice. They can make genuine catastrophes of the occasional security flaw, too. We have much less diversity in browsers than would be healthy for such a pervasive and essential platform.
I agree, and that’s also why I was disappointed when Microsoft decided to abandon their Edge browser code and move to a Chromium fork. That leave us down to 2 truly independent web browser implementations in the world.
I don’t like their monopolistic shenanigans back in the 90s, but I don’t trust Google to be a monopoly over the web either.
I was really hoping this article would be about how Mozilla decided to write a new, awesome RegExp library written in Rust that implemented the ECMAScript standard. I guess it makes sense to re-use Irregexp, since it’s already written and optimized…
Well if they were going in that direction, I would hope they would have used the already-existing Rust Rexexp library, and added any features needed to make it do the job.
It’s cool that they were able to collaborate so smoothly with the V8 team to get the whole thing working better for everyone. But on the other hand, I wonder how concerned I should be that more and more of the infrastructure of web browsers, and therefore the effective definition of the web itself, seems to be converging into a single codebase.
Thankfully, WebKit still maintains a different regular expression engine than Blink. It happens to be the same YARR which Gecko abandoned in favor of Irregexp.
https://github.com/WebKit/webkit/tree/master/Source/JavaScriptCore/yarr
You should be very concerned. Monocultures don’t make things “better for everyone,” they subvert standards, stifle innovation, and restrict your freedom of choice. They can make genuine catastrophes of the occasional security flaw, too. We have much less diversity in browsers than would be healthy for such a pervasive and essential platform.
I agree, and that’s also why I was disappointed when Microsoft decided to abandon their Edge browser code and move to a Chromium fork. That leave us down to 2 truly independent web browser implementations in the world.
I don’t like their monopolistic shenanigans back in the 90s, but I don’t trust Google to be a monopoly over the web either.
So how long before Firefox is just another Chrome theme?
I’m joking, of course, but this certainly doesn’t help the “web diversity” argument that some people use to promote Firefox.
It’s even more strange considering how many regex implementations are out there and not produced by the devs of a competing browser.
Indeed but Firefox still has its own rendering and JS engines, so the point still stands IMO.
I doubt these RegExp engines are both as fast as v8’s engine and support all of JavaScript’s RegExp features.