Comment by stephc_int13
2 years ago
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.
Moving to a non profit, forking from SerenityOS and (as a result of that) no longer being tied to C++ all happened at the same time.
It's possible Apple could be paying them to develop a rival browser but... why?
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.
I am very confused by your message. I know both Rust and C++ and think it’s an improvement in many ways. Why do you you think it’s worse without using the language?
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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.
Servo was never usable as a "real browser", and it's been revived since last year by Igalia. Looks like you should refresh your view on the project overall.
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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?