Comment by jonkoops
5 days ago
I have to be honest that I don't really understand the appeal of Ladybird from a purely technical perspective. It is written in C++, just like all the existing engines (yes there is some Swift, but it is negligible), so what benefit does it provide over Gecko or Blink? With Servo, I can see there is a distinct technical design around security and parallelism.
There is more to a project this massive than its choice of language. For me though it's mostly about breaking from the monopoly and putting a check on Google's influence over browser space.
> There is more to a project this massive than its choice of language
For writing a game, or Figma replacement, or some cutesy something that runs on your machine without requiring network access, probably. For one of the most impactful applications that downloads untrusted code from the Internet and executes it without any confirmation whatsoever, the language for sure does matter. "Chrome RCE" is a phrase that strikes fear, and it's not a rare occurrence. I'll point out that Google is not lacking some of the most skilled security researchers and tooling in the world, so I wish the Ladybird folks godspeed doing their own "does this build have vulns?" work
Well that's why they're going to rewrite parts of the code where those things are more likely in Swift
Many many factors to consider. Simplistic take: KHTML was picked up by Apple because of its clean design and codebase; there's an extra 30 years of accumulated improvements in C++; you don't write stuff in Rust 1.0 either.
Also: Andreas has worked on Webkit/Blink. He knew what he was doing when he started the project, even if it was "just for fun". Linux started under similar circumstances.
Linux started under circumstances of Linus wanting to learn 386 assembler. He got two processes writing alternating As and Bs to demonstrate 386 multitasking. Linus had to find SunOS docs etc to copy system call signatures from. It's truly an accidental success story, and while Linus is smart & capable he sure as hell did not "know what he was doing", the whole point was to learn and fiddle with it.
Starting a new browser project without a solid security architecture seems just a bad idea to me. It's such a hostile operating environment. Personal computing in the early 90s was a very different place.
Torvalds had his debate with prof. Tanenbaum (a specialist in OS research), stuck with his own opinions, and achieved an extraordinary success, continuing as a technical project leader and architect for 35+ years and counting. It's circumstantial, but not accidental.
Rust does not produce magic in the assembly code. It does not even produce faster assembly code. Rust toolchain on it's own does not even produce assembly code. It just passes that to LLVM that does THE ENTIRE optimization. Without LLVM (written in C++) doing the heavy lifting, Rust is probably slower than V8 (written in C++) running JavaScript. There's no technical marver in Servo compared to Ladybird. I don't understand the yapping how a language makes projects good/bad, despite it being proven completely false again and again. The appeal is in independence and politics around the project.
The express purpose of building Servo in the first place was to experiment with ways to parallelize the layout algorithm. The advantage of Rust is that it is a language which enables the compiler to better enforce some of the rules that need to be followed to write correct thread-safe code. Note that Mozilla had previously tried--more than once--to do the same thing in C++ for Gecko, and both attempts had failed.
As for the rest of your comment... I believe Rust now has MIR-based optimizations, so it's no longer the case that "THE ENTIRE optimization" is due to LLVM. But it's a non-sequitur to say that Rust would be slower without LLVM. Rust doesn't do many optimizations on its own, because it's quite frankly a lot of boring tedium to implement an entire optimizing compiler stack, and if you've got a library you can use to do that, why not? If no such library were available, Rust would merely be implementing all of those optimizations itself, much as V8 implements those optimizations itself.