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Comment by jm4

5 days ago

You should look into why they chose it and what their implementation plan is. They evaluated multiple languages, including rust. There were some specific issues with rust that made it unsuitable for them. Swift was a bit of a dark horse candidate that the developers ended liking.

There is no immediate plan to switch to anything so it’s still C++. They may not ever switch. Swift’s cross platform support isn’t there yet and that’s a prerequisite.

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jm4

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Buttons840  5 days ago

I couldn't find any information beyond that Tweet I linked.

  • jm4  5 days ago

    I'll see if I can find it. I don't remember the specifics on rust, but it sounded like they gave it a fair shot. It was basically the one to beat until they figured out it wasn't going to work. The decision to adopt Swift wasn't made on a whim and, frankly, I'm skeptical it will happen any time soon, if ever. I think it's one of those situations where they want to make it more accessible to a next generation of developers the same way Linux is adopting rust. Swift is actually a really nice language, despite being associated primarily with Apple. It would be cool to see higher adoption.

    Ladybird has an interesting way of documenting web standards in code. They put a link to the reference doc at the top of a function and then each rule in a comment where it is implemented. It's very easy to follow and good quality code. Another project I recall having high quality code was KHTML. Not coincidentally, Andreas Kling worked on that one too.

    There are examples here: https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird/tree/master/Libr...

    Anyway, the point is what they are doing is working well and Swift won't be ready for a while. If it ever happens, it won't be a rewrite. It'll more likely be a situation where it's written in both the same way Linux is both C and rust.

  • Perz1val  5 days ago

    Andreas has said that in some video I watched at some point, can't pinpoint it, but I can confirm jm4 didn't make it up