Yesterday we had a hackathon/meeting to discuss the overarching design of Servo, the project to build a next-generation rendering engine. We didn’t ultimately do much hacking (though we did a little), but mostly we tried to hammer out the big picture so that we can actually get to writing code. I wanted to try and write up what I understood as the consensus (for the moment, anyway).

The big picture

There will be (at least) three large components. Each is basically operating in independent tasks and the various stages are therefore largely isolated from one another and able to execute independently (with certain exceptions, as we shall see):