After a discussion this morning about the potential for parallel CSS layout with Erik Aarvidson, he pointed out a group at Berkeley doing research in this area: http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~lmeyerov/projects/pbrowser/ The bits that jumped out to me were: * the source is available [0] * they've implemented an abstract language for describing the CSS spec for parameterizing layout. It reminds me a lot of the work Badros did circa 2000 [1]. They suggest that this model does layout of the CSS 2.1 spec in time similar to the hand-tuned sequential engine in Gecko [2] * using Cilk++ to handle low-level paralleism, they've seen significant speedups beyond that for multi-core [2] It's exciting to me to see this kind of parallelism being extracted from CSS layout operations, which have shown up in profiling of Google apps as a serious bottleneck. I hesitate to ask about the WebKit community's interest in this since I assume that if patches show up and can prove their value, they'll be accepted, but I would like to know where people are either supportive or skeptical about such an approach. Regards [0]: http://code.google.com/p/pbrowser/source/browse/#svn/trunk [1]: http://www.badros.com/greg/papers/gjbadros-dissertation.pdf [2]: http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~lmeyerov/projects/pbrowser/retreatwinter2009/p... , slide #19