genet

genet is a prototype web/UI engine derived from Servo and rebuilt on the Linebender ecosystem (vello, parley, taffy). It keeps Servo's Rust foundation and the Stylo CSS cascade, removes SpiderMonkey and the multiprocess subsystems, and layers its own modular layout, pluggable JS scripting, and rendering paths on top.

_{Pelt, genet's reference browser, driving a local document through its native chrome.}

Status (2026-08-12)

Active prototype. A development monorepo of ~50 crates, all publish = false.

• Layout, hit-testing, scrolling, selection, find-in-page, focus order, and the external-texture element view are landed and tested. Remote http(s) loading is on by default via the in-repo netfetcher family.
• Scripting is an engine-neutral seam with three working backends: Nova (primary native), Boa (pure Rust, wasm and conformance oracle), and Piccolo (Lua).
• A clean-room CSS engine (components/livery) and layout engine (components/buckram) are under heavy development beside the incumbent Stylo lane. The scripted livery route reached Pelt on 2026-08-10.
• components/cambium/ is the reactive UI toolkit, including the shared desktop host (cambium-genet-winit-host) that sibling apps build on. Client-side window decorations landed on that host 2026-08-10.
• Consumed one-way as the engine layer by the mere platform workspace and the turnstone, isometry, woodshed, and hocket apps. Rendering lowers into the sibling netrender repo.

Current state and plans are tracked in docs/, named by date; the most recent docs are authoritative. The strategic arc is the livery + buckram clean-room CSS-and-layout route toward a full-web cutover.

Use

Builds with cargo on the pinned toolchain (rust-toolchain.toml) on a stock Windows setup. The default member is ports/pelt, the reference browser and validation viewer.

cargo build

# On-screen document viewer (file://, bare paths, data:, http(s))
cargo run -p pelt -- --engine static <url-or-file>

# Scripted profile: run a page's inline <script> and render the mutated DOM
cargo run -p pelt --features scripted -- --engine scripted <file>

# Clean-room CSS lane
cargo run -p pelt --features livery-scripted -- --engine livery-scripted <file>

# Headless snapshot / reftest harness
cargo run -p pelt -- --engine headless --out <file>.scene

pelt --help lists every profile, flag, and smoke runner.

cargo test --workspace                 # unit/lib tests
cargo run -p genet-wpt -- run <subset> # WPT crash-smoke, e.g. css/CSS2/floats

License

genet is a derivative of Servo and is licensed under MPL-2.0 (exceptions: meristem Apache-2.0, sprigging MIT OR Apache-2.0).

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This README was generated by AI and will be edited by the author upon release.