Comment by christophilus
2 years ago
For those who are worried, Andreas is a thoughtful dude. This decision was not made on a whim.
Also, they’re not doing a massive rewrite:
> The Swift team is also investing heavily in C++ interop, which means there's a real path to incremental adoption, not just gigantic rewrites.
To me, the Tweet does a good job justifying the decision. I’m rooting for Ladybird, and I hope this decision pays off. A modern browser in a modern language sounds like a dream come true.
> For those who are worried, Andreas is a thoughtful dude. This decision was not made on a whim.
Yes. But many terrible decisions are taken this same way.
> and I hope this decision pays off
It is terrible when we need to hope for something to succeed because we see that they are clearly doing something wrong but will do it that way anyway because they are strong-willed. Just take the obvious path everybody is pointing to.
Guy doesn't even know Swift yet, wants to rewrite a Chrome/Firefox alternative using it. That's a great recipe for failure. Alright, I need to find another browser project to be delusional about.
it's not a rewrite
I strongly disagree. This is not a justified decision, they just feel like it based either on vague and speculative reasons, or because they are funded to do so, I would not be surprised if they had discussions with the Swift marketing team.
Andreas has been talking about liking and exploring Swift since before he started working on Jakt [0] and if you look at Jakt you will clearly see it is heavily influenced by Swift.
[0] https://github.com/SerenityOS/jakt
Can you back up this claim? Knowing what I know of both Andreas and the Swift team I find this comment incredibly bizarre.
You either know something the rest of us don’t or you have made an emotional outburst in the form of an insult.
I don't know. This is speculation on my side.
But they recently announced funding as a non-profit, as a few days later, they switch to Swift.
Following the money is a good way to explain seemingly irrational decisions, at least as a first order approximation.
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I feel like the tweet explains their rationale pretty well... the main reason being memory safety. It's a constant overhead in both programming time and bug handling for them.
Then build your own browser in Rust, start contributing to Servo, and who cares when a volunteer writes a browser in any language?
Write a browser in COBOL for all I care. If it’s open source, it’s still a gift.
Absolutely not.
I don't know Rust and I think it is worse than C++ in many ways.
This is a false dichotomy, they don't have to switch language mid-course.
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> start contributing to Servo
Servo as a browser is (sort of) dead, though webrender still lives.
I remember when (back when the icon was a doge) it had an actual UI and could be used as a real web browser... that's all been stripped out now.
https://book.servo.org/:
> Work is still ongoing to make Servo consumable as a webview library, so for now, the only supported way to use Servo is via servoshell, our winit- and egui-based example browser.
A shame, really, since the Servo project was the source of some of the best macOS Cocoa/AppKit bindings for Rust.
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> who cares when a volunteer writes a browser in any language?
All the people that replied with something akin to "Why is this written in C++" when Ladybird was initially announced, which probably influenced the decistion to switch to Swift.
> If it’s open source, it’s still a gift.
I would be careful with this thought. Open source is being used a marketing in disguise more often than not, especially here
How do you know?