Having servo wrapped up with a nice api and sdk with a good up to date default example project is exactly what I mean. Just like electron/ultralight/sciter. These projects are great but they haven't been updated for over 6 months and they aren't designed for mass (developer) consumption. Not to disparage, even servo is still WIP so I understand that a ultralight-equivalent isn't possible right now, I'm just excited for when it does happen for servo. Don't downplay the value of packaging and documentation. :)
Last time I looked at Servo for the same purpose, the build was clocking at ~40MB. Unless something changes drastically, it's not gonna be any better than Chromium for Electron-type apps (except better performance).
I don't know if your figure of 40MB includes support for javascript, but if Servo offers native DOM apis that would let you omit all js-related dependencies. (I don't know if it will, hence "if".) Even at 40MB, with static assets like html templates, css, and images, and a compiled binary, you could probably package a full-featured app up at ~60MB, less if compressed.
I wanted to know how that stacked up against some of my favorite and most used apps on windows, so I made a list: https://pastebin.com/KnkFcJXh (sorry, it's a bit long for HN).
I'll be honest, if I could publish a native app that's blazing fast, is cross platform, and whose size sits between Paint.NET (40) and VLC (130), and is even a fraction as useful as those two I would be downright ecstatic. I know for some people the final build size is a very important metric for native apps, and to those people I'm sorry. But if it's under 100MB and it uses about the same amount of ram I'm actually pretty ok with it, and I think a lot of others would agree with me.
For a period of time there were CEF interfaces for Servo. Unfortunately, when Firefox added their GPU webrender stuff, it broke and there was no effort to go back and fix it.
I looked into using this for a project and discovered this unfortunate result.
