Browser Engine (Rust)

A tiny experimental browser engine implemented in Rust. It parses a hard-coded HTML string into a DOM and "renders" it by pretty-printing the node tree to the terminal. This is mainly for learning and experimentation with parsing, DOM construction, and rendering logic.

Requirements

• Rust toolchain (recommended: install via rustup)
  • cargo available on your PATH
• Supported platforms: Developed and tested on macOS, but it should work anywhere Rust does.

Getting Started

1. Clone the repository

git clone <your-repo-url> browser_engine
cd browser_engine

2. Verify Rust is installed

rustc --version
cargo --version

If these commands fail, install Rust from https://rustup.rs.

Building the Project

From the project root:

cargo build

This will compile the browser_engine binary into the target/debug directory.

Running the Browser Engine

From the project root:

cargo run

This will:

• Parse the hard-coded HTML string defined in src/main.rs
• Build a DOM tree via the html and dom modules
• Render/pretty-print the resulting node tree to the terminal via the draw module

You can change the HTML input by editing the string in src/main.rs (look for the html variable inside the main function).

Project Structure

• Cargo.toml – Rust package manifest and metadata
• src/main.rs – Binary entrypoint wiring together parsing and drawing
• src/html.rs – HTML parser and related logic
• src/dom.rs – DOM node definitions and tree representation
• src/draw.rs – Rendering/pretty-printing of the DOM tree to the terminal

Development Tips

• Format the code

cargo fmt

• Run with debug output
  You can add println! calls inside html, dom, or draw modules to inspect intermediate structures while learning how the engine works.

Troubleshooting

• Build fails:

  • Ensure you are using a recent Rust toolchain (rustc --version) compatible with the 2024 edition.
  • Run cargo clean && cargo build to force a fresh build.

• Binary not found:

  • Always run from the project root with cargo run. Cargo will handle building and running the browser_engine binary for you.