Mozilla gave it the boot, but the Linux Foundation Europe gave it the kiss of life instead
Open Source Summit A pleasant surprise from Open Source Summit is that Servo, the Rusty rendering engine that Mozilla was working on – until COVID, that is – is showing green shoots of renewed vigor.
Servo has been around for about a decade, so as experimental software projects go, it’s a mature one. Igalia developer Manuel Rego presented a talk which reports that the project is back under active development, almost exactly three years after Mozilla terminated its Rust efforts and laid off the whole Rust team, including the Servo developers.
In November 2020, the Linux Foundation adopted Servo. However, the global operation has a lot of projects – we think we count 625 of them, but we could be wrong. Early this year, it handed the project over to its new European division, which has a slightly more manageable list of four, among them the OpenWallet foundation and the RISC-V Software Ecosystem. Now this also includes Servo.
Servo first appeared in tandem with Rust a full decade ago, and by 2016 Mozilla was discussing releasing a prototype. Previews started to appear that July, when as we put it: „If Google has the language of Go, Moz has the language of No: Rust.
