The 2023 edition of Igalia’s Web Engines Hackfest starts this coming Monday at Palexco in A Coruña, and we have a whole lot in store! On Monday, we’ll have a series of presentations that will all be streamed live on the Hackfest’s Youtube channel:

• “JavaScript Modules: Past, Present, and Future” by Nicolò Ribaudo — Do JavaScript developers need any capabilities that the language does not currently provide? What problems do ECMAScript modules currently cause? Are there any missing functionalities compared to previous systems? Nicolò will explore these and other questions.
• “Inside Kotlin/Wasm (or, how your language could benefit from new proposals like GC, EH, TFR)” by Zalim Bashorov — Zalim’s talk is for developers interested in the internals of Kotlin/Wasm and who want to have a deeper understanding of how Kotlin and similar languages could be compiled to Wasm, and how they could be helpful to other languages targeting WebAssembly.
• “Status of the WPE & GTK WebKit ports” by Žan Doberšek — Žan will examine the current state of both Linux-based WebKit ports, including recent and ongoing relevant changes inside the project and the surrounding ecosystem. He will also present future architectural changes, along with proposals of baseline solutions and subsequent envisioned ramifications.
• “Servo 2023” by Delan Azabani — Delan will go over the work done so far in the adoption of Servo, a web engine written in Rust, and plans for the rest of 2023 in Servo’s layout system, as well as how you can help.
• “Ladybird: Building a new browser from scratch” by Andreas Kling — Ladybird is a new browser (and engine) built completely from scratch, originally only usable on SerenityOS, but now expanded into its own cross-platform browser. Andreas will tell the story of Ladybird starting from nothing in 2019, share some of the challenges the project faced along the way, and provide an architectural overview of the engine.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, we’ll have a series of breakout sessions spanning the spectrum from getting started with web engine contributing to engine overviews to detailed dives into accelerated compositing.

The Web Engines Hackfest is an event that gets together people to work on different browsers and related standards. Our goal is to foster collaboration in benefit of the open web.

Many thanks to our outside sponsors, ARM and Google, for helping make this year’s Hackfest possible, and to everyone attending in person or remotely for being a part of the Hackfest community.