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wilsonzlin
fastrender
HTML2026–2026
wilsonzlin / fastrender

fastrender

Experimental new browser engine

20Distinct people
27Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
1.6KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Experimental new browser engine

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by month27 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2026-01-14 22:59:28 UTC to 2026-09-28 19:03:34 UTC.

051015202026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-02-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 22 mentions; 1 submissions, 21 commentsJan 20262026-02-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-03-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2026-03-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-04-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2026-04-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-05-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2026-05-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-06-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 commentsMay 20262026-06-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-07-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2026-07-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-08-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2026-08-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-09-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2026-09-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-10-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 commentsSep 2026

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
Jan 20262026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-02-01 00:00:00 UTC22121
Feb 20262026-02-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-03-01 00:00:00 UTC101
Mar 20262026-03-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-04-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Apr 20262026-04-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-05-01 00:00:00 UTC000
May 20262026-05-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-06-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Jun 20262026-06-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-07-01 00:00:00 UTC101
Jul 20262026-07-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-08-01 00:00:00 UTC202
Aug 20262026-08-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-09-01 00:00:00 UTC000
Sep 20262026-09-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-10-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

27 sources
> As of writing, Claude Code CLI only has around 9100 open Github issues, with small unresolved issues like it completely freezing for the last 6+ months or a screen flickering issue open for more than a year. But surely those fully autonomous coding loops will solve all those 9,100+ open issues on GitHub? Why haven't they? What happened to Claude's C Compiler [0], or that browser "built from scratch" by Cursor? [1] Why aren't the agents maintaining it if they are supposed to be cheaper than humans? > But why do they have us by the balls? Dario and Boris have us convinced that “coding is solved” with their loops. But microwaves didn’t solve cooking. They have you by the balls if you allow them to, if you continue to listen to their bullshit. Both of them are essentially salesmen at this point. They don't care if they are wrong and will se
Read the rest
ll Claude to whoever is thinking of planning the next mass layoff. Their definition of "AGI" is different to yours. The correct answer to all of this pricing nonsense that Anthropic and others are doing is local open weight models that you run on your own machine. They know this and powerful local models undercut their entire business model if hosted by others or if a smaller local model matches the performance of larger ones. [1] https://github.com/anthropics/claudes-c-compiler [0] https://github.com/wilsonzlin/fastrender
In Anthropic's Method to Losing Goodwill in a Few Easy Steps
That Tweet that was seen by 6 million people is here: https://x.com/mntruell/status/2011562190286045552 You only quoted the first line. The full tweet includes the crucial "it kind of works" line - that's not in the follow-up tweet, it's in the original. Here's that first tweet in full: > We built a browser with GPT-5.2 in Cursor. It ran uninterrupted for one week. > It's 3M+ lines of code across thousands of files. The rendering engine is from-scratch in Rust with HTML parsing, CSS cascade, layout, text shaping, paint, and a custom JS VM. > It kind of works! It still has issues and is of course very far from Webkit/Chromium parity, but we were astonished that simple websites render quickly and largely correctly. The second tweet, with only 225,000 views, was just the following text and a link to the GitHub repository: > Excited to contin
Read the rest
ue stress testing the boundaries of coding agents and report back on what we learn. > Code here: https://github.com/wilsonzlin/fastrender
In When AI 'builds a browser,' check the repo before believing the hype
> "It kind of works" https://github.com/wilsonzlin/fastrender/issues/98 A project that didn't compile at all counts as "kind of" working now? > I won't stand for misleading rhetoric like "it's just a Servo wrapper" when that isn't true. True, at least if it was a wrapper then it would actually kind of work, unlike this which is the most obvious case of hyping lies up for investors I've witnessed in the last... Well, week or so, considering how much bullshit spews out of the mouths of AI bros.
In When AI 'builds a browser,' check the repo before believing the hype
So I think that's an easy way to achieve ecstasy for you then. I suggest giving it a try. A good place to look for how one could do this, is https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz/tree/main That project I consider a proper POC of a web engine, even though it doesn't even run javascript. Why? Because it has a nice architecture built around a clear idea--radical modularity--which could scale-up to a full web engine one day, despite major challenges remaining. I think that with AI assistance, if you had some idea, you could reshuffle components of Blitz and have your own thing rendering to the screen within a day. let's say you had a more ambitious goal, like taking Blitz and adding a JS engine like Boa. Well if you had some clear idea on how to do it, you could get a nice little POC in a week or two. Basically what I'm saying is that yes the A
Read the rest
I would save you a ton of typing and you'd be able to iterate on your idea. There are plenty of layout/graphics/Js components out there to choose from, so you could ensure a relatively small and clean POC. Someone doing that, with or without AI but with a good idea, would impress me. FastRender on the other hand is just this humongous pile of spaghetti, and my guess is it still is entirely dependent on existing libraries for actually showing something to the screen. So that's the clear fail of the agent in my opinion: why produce so much code when it could be done so easily otherwise. Also, why bs yourself into these architecture docs and pretend you are following the specs when in fact you are not? Everytime I try to browse the code I give up, mostly because when I look at something to try to understand how it fits into the whole, I end-up realizing it's only used in some unit-test. For a quick comparison: - https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz/blob/f828015b26d32b0bed3... - https://github.com/wilsonzlin/fastrender/blob/19bf1036105d4e... I believe the two are more or less doing the same, but one is 30x the size of the other. I can't begin to understand the render loop of Fastrender from the code. On the other hand, here is the one from Blitz shell(the default Blitz app putting together various modular components): - Window runs in winit loop: https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz/blob/f828015b26d32b0bed3... - Redraw is at https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz/blob/f828015b26d32b0bed3... - Calls into `paint_scene`, using the generic scene from the generic renderer: https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz/blob/f828015b26d32b0bed3... Simple as that, and with a nice idea in terms of modularity. That's a POC web engine.
In Wilson Lin on FastRender: a browser built by parallel agents
> there are real complex systems being engineered towards the goal of a browser engine, even if not there yet. In various comments in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46624541 I have explained at length why your fleet of autonomous agents failed miserably at building something that could be seen as a valid POC. One example: your rendering loop does not follow the web specs and makes no sense. https://github.com/wilsonzlin/fastrender/blob/19bf1036105d4e... The above design document is simply nonsense; typical AI hallucinated BS. Detailed critique at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46705625 The actual code is worse; I can only describe it as a tangle of spaghetti. As a Browser expert I can't make much, if anything, out of it. In comparison, when I look at code in Ladybird, a project I am not involved in, I can instantly find my way
Read the rest
around the code because I know the web specs. So I agree this isn't just wiring up of dependencies, and neither is it copied from existing implementations: it's a uniquely bad design that could never support anything resembling a real-world web engine. Now don't get me wrong, I do think AI could be leveraged to build a web engine, but not by unleashing autonomous agents. You need humans in the loop at all levels of abstractions; the agents should only be used to bang out features re-using patterns established or vetted by human experts. If you want to do this the right way, get in touch: https://github.com/gterzian
In Scaling long-running autonomous coding
I think the current approach is simply not scalable to a working browser ever. To leverage AI to build a working browser you would imo need the following: - A team of humans with some good ideas on how to improve on existing web engines. - A clear architectural story written not by agents but by humans. Architecture does not mean high-level diagrams only. At each level of abstraction, you need humans to decide what makes sense and only use the agent to bang out slight variations. - A modular and human-overseen agentic loop approach: one agent can keep running to try to fix a specific CSS feature(like grid), with a human expert reviewing the work at some interval(not sure how fine-grained it should be). This is actually very similar to running an open-source project: you have code owners and a modular review process, not just an army of co
Read the rest
ntributor committing whatever they want. And a "judge agent" is not the same thing as a human code owner as reviewer. Example on how not to do it: https://github.com/wilsonzlin/fastrender/blob/19bf1036105d4e... This rendering loop architecture makes zero sense, and it does not implement web standards. > in the HTML Standard, requestAnimationFrame is part of the frame rendering steps (“update the rendering”), which occur after running a task and performing a microtask checkpoint > requestAnimationFrame callbacks run on the frame schedule, not as normal tasks. This is BS: "update the rendering" is specified as just another task, which means it needs to be followed by a microtask checkpoint. See https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/#event-loop-processin... Following the spec doesn't mean you cannot optimize rendering tasks in some way vs other tasks in your implementation, but the above is not that, it's classic AI bs. Understanding Web standards and translating them into an implementation requires human judgement. Don't use an agent to draft your architecture; an expert in web standards with a interest in agentic coding is what is required. Message to Cursor CEO: next time, instead of lighting up those millions on fire, reach out to me first: https://github.com/gterzian
In Scaling long-running autonomous coding

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