The commit removing Swift has a little bit more detail:
Everywhere: Abandon Swift adoption
After making no progress on this for a very long time, let's acknowledge
it's not going anywhere and remove it from the codebase.
As someone who first began using Swift in 2021, after almost 10 years in C#/.NET land, I was already a bit grumpy at how complex C# was, (C# was 21 years at that point), but then coming to Swift, I couldn't believe how complex Swift was compared to C# - Swift was released in 2014, so would've been 8 years old in 2022. How is a language less than half the age of C# MORE complex than C#?
And this was me trying to use Swift for a data access layer + backend web API. There's barely any guidance or existing knowledge on using Swift for backend APIs, let alone a web browser of all projects.
There's no precedent or existing implementation you can look at for reference; known best practices in Swift are geared almost entirely towards using it with Apple platform APIs, so tons of knowledge about using the language itself simply cannot be applied outside the domain of building client-running apps for Apple hardware.
To use swift outside its usual domain is to become a pioneer, and try something truly untested. It was always a longshot.
I started using it around 2018. After being reasonably conversant in Objective-C, I fully adopted Swift for a new iOS app and thought it was a big improvement.
But there's a lot of hokey, amateurish stuff in there... with more added all the time. Let's start with the arbitrary "structs are passed by value, classes by reference." And along with that: "Prefer structs over classes."
But then: "Have one source of truth." Um... you can't do that when every data structure is COPIED on every function call. So now what? I spent so much time dicking around trying to conform to Swift's contradictory "best practices" that developing became a joyless trudge with glacial progress. I finally realized that a lot of the sources I was reading didn't know WTF they were talking about and shitcanned their edicts.
A lot of the crap in Swift and SwiftUI remind me of object orientation, and how experienced programmers arrived at a distilled version of it that kept the useful parts and rejected dumb or utterly impractical ideas that were preached in the early days.
I think Swift was developed to keep a number of constituencies happy.
You can do classic OOP, FP, Protocol-Oriented Programming, etc., or mix them all (like I do).
A lot of purists get salty that it doesn’t force implementation of their choice, but I’m actually fine with it. I tend to have a “chimeric” approach, so it suits me.
Been using it since 2014 (the day it was announced). I enjoy it.
No Swift was developed as a strategic moat around Apple's devices. They cannot be dependent on any other party for the main language that runs on their hardware. Controlling your own destiny full stack means having your own language.
Apple already had that "strategic moat" with Objective-C. It was already a language you could effectively only use on Apple platforms (the runtime and the standard library only run on Darwin) and for which Apple controlled the compiler (they have their own fork of Clang).
I suspect that it was developed, in order to make native development more accessible. SwiftUI is also doing that.
They want native, partly as a “moat,” but also as a driver for hardware and services sales. They don’t want folks shrugging and saying “It doesn’t matter what you buy; they’re all the same.”
I hear exactly that, with regard to many hybrid apps.
There are plenty of valid reasons to use classes in Swift. For example if you want to have shared state you will need to use a class so that each client has the same reference instead of a copy.
> But there's a lot of hokey, amateurish stuff in there... with more added all the time. Let's start with the arbitrary "structs are passed by value, classes by reference." And along with that: "Prefer structs over classes."
This is the same way that C# works and C and C++ why is this a surprise?
Nowhere does it say structs provide “one source of truth”. It says the opposite actually- that classes are to be used when unique instances are required. All classes have a unique ID, which is simply it’s virtual memory address. Structs by contrast get memcpy’d left and right and have no uniqueness.
You can also look at the source code for the language if any it’s confusing. It’s very readable.
Have one source of truth is a universal guideline.
Prefer structs over classes is a universal, if weak, guideline.
It's funny how people can be all hung up on composability of things like type systems, and then completely blow off the desire for composability of guidelines.
In the last years, simplistic languages such as Python and Go have “made the case” that complexity is bad, period. But when humans communicate expertly in English (Shakespeare, JK Rowling, etc) they use its vast wealth of nuance, shading and subtlety to create a better product. Sure you have to learn all the corners to have full command of the language, to wield all that expressive power (and newcomers to English are limited to the shallow end of the pool). But writing and reading are asymmetrical and a more expressive language used well can expose the code patterns and algorithms in a way that is easier for multiple maintainers to read and comprehend. We need to match the impedance of the tool to the problem. [I paraphrase Larry Wall, inventor of the gloriously expressive https://raku.org]
Not sure how I feel about Shakespeare and JK Rowling living in the same parenthesis!
Computer languages are the opposite of natural languages - they are for formalising and limiting thought, the exact opposite of literature. These two things are not comparable.
If natural language was so good for programs, we’d be using it - many many people have tried from literate programming onward.
I fully accept that formalism is an important factor in programming language design. But all HLLs (well, even ASM) are a compromise between machine speak (https://youtu.be/CTjolEUj00g?si=79zMVRl0oMQo4Tby) and human speak. My case is that the current fashion is to draw the line at an overly simple level, and that there are ways to wrap the formalism in more natural constructs that trigger the parts of the brain that have evolved to hanle language (nouns, verbs, adverbs, prepositions and so on).
Here's a very simple, lexical declaration made more human friendly by use of the preposition `my` (or `our` if it is packaged scoped)...
Well, when you add in the '$' and ';' tokens the "let" example is still shorter. Also as another person replied to you, those other two examples are declarations in other languages. So 0 for 3 there.
Literate programming is not about programming in natural languages: it's about integrating code (i.e. the formal description in some DSL) with the meta-code such as comments, background information, specs, tests, etc.
BTW, one side benefit of LP is freedom from arbitrary structure of DSLs. A standard practice in LP is to declare and define objects in the spot in which they are being used; LP tools will parse them out and distribute to the syntactically correct places.
Well I think the ambition was to have as much as possible in natural language, with macros calling out to ‘hidden’ code intended for machines. So I do think there is a good link with later attempts to write using natural language and make computer languages more human-friendly and he was one of the first to have this idea.
Exactly. I mean think about the programming languages used in aircraft and such. There's reasons. It all depends on what people are willing to tolerate.
>But writing and reading are asymmetrical and a more expressive language used well can expose the code patterns and algorithms in a way that is easier for multiple maintainers to read and comprehend.
It's exactly the opposite. Writing and reading are asymmetrical, and that's why it's important to write code that is as simple as possible.
It's easy to introduce a lot of complexity and clever hacks, because as the author you understand it. But good code is readable for people, and that's why very expressive languages like perl are abhorred.
> Writing and reading are asymmetrical, and that's why it's important to write code that is as simple as possible.
I 100% agree with your statement. My case is that a simple language does not necessarily result in simpler and more readable code. You need a language that fits the problem domain and that does not require a lot of boilerplate to handle more complex structures. If you are shoehorning a problem into an overly simplistic language, then you are fighting your tool. OO for OO. FP for FP. and so on.
I fear that the current fashion to very simple languages is a result of confusing these aspects and by way of enforcing certain corporate behaviours on coders. Perhaps that has its place eg Go in Google - but the presumption that one size fits all is quite a big limitation for many areas.
The corollary of this is that richness places an burden of responsibility on the coder not to write code golf. By tbh you can write bad code in any language if you put your mind to it.
Perhaps many find richness and expressivity abhorrent - but to those of us who like Larry's thinking it is a really nice, addictive feeling when the compiler gets out of the way. Don't knock it until you give it a fair try!
Then you should write assembly only. Like `MOV`, `ADD`... can't really get simpler than that.
Problem is, that makes every small part of the program simple, but it increases the number of parts (and/or their interaction). And ultimately, if you need to understand the whole thing it's suddenly much harder.
Surely you can write the same behaviour in "clever" (when did that become a negative attribute?) or "good" way in assembly. You are correct. But that's a different matter.
> Get into a rut early: Do the same process the same way. Accumulate idioms. Standardize. The only difference(!) between Shakespeare and you was the size of his idiom list - not the size of his vocabulary.
Complexity-wise, this version is more complicated (mixing different styles and paradigms) and it's barely less tokens. Lines of code don't matter anyway, cognitive load does.
Even though I barely know Raku (but I do have experience with FP), it took way less time to intuitively grasp what the Raku was doing, vs. both the Python versions. If you're only used to imperative code, then yeah, maybe the Python looks more familiar, though then... how about riding some new bicycles for the mind.
> Complexity-wise, this version is more complicated (mixing different styles and paradigms)
Really? In the other Python version the author went out of his way to keep two variables, and shit out intermediate results as you went. The raku version generates a sequence that doesn't even actually get output if you're executing inside a program, but that can be used later as a sequence, if you bind it to something.
I kept my version to the same behavior as that Python version, but that's different than the raku version, and not in a good way.
You should actually ignore the print in the python, since the raku wasn't doing it anyway. So how is "create a sequence, then while it is not as long as you like, append the sum of the last two elements" a terrible mix of styles and paradigms, anyway? Where do you get off writing that?
> Lines of code don't matter anyway, cognitive load does.
I agree, and the raku line of code imposes a fairly large cognitive load.
If you prefer "for" to "while" for whatever reason, here's a similar Python to the raku.
seq = [0,1]
seq.extend(sum(seq[-2:]) for _ in range(18))
The differences are that it's a named sequence, and it doesn't go on forever and then take a slice. No asterisks that don't mean multiply, no carets that don't mean bitwise exclusive or.
> If you're only used to imperative code, then yeah, maybe the Python looks more familiar, though then... how about riding some new bicycles for the mind.
It's not (in my case, anyway) actually about imperative vs functional. It's about twisty stupid special symbol meanings.
Raku is perl 6 and it shows. Some people like it and that's fine. Some people don't and that's fine, too. What's not fine is to make up bogus comparisons and bogus implications about the people who don't like it.
Reminds me a bit of the fish anecdote told by DFW... they've only swam in water their entire life, so they don't even understand what water is.
Here are the mixed paradigms/styles in these Python snippets:
- Statements vs. expressions
- Eager list comprehensions vs. lazy generator expressions
- Mutable vs. immutable data structures / imperative reference vs. functional semantics
(note that the Raku version only picks _one_ side of those)
> seq.extend(sum(seq[-2:]) for _ in range(18))
I mean, this is the worst Python code yet. To explain what this does to a beginner, or even intermediate programmer.... oooooh boy.
You have the hidden inner iteration loop inside the `.extend` standard library method driving the lazy generator expression with _unspecified_ one-step-at-a-time semantics, which causes `seq[-2:]` to be evaluated at exactly the right time, and then `seq` is extended even _before_ the `.extend` finishes (which is very surprising!), causing the next generator iteration to read a _partially_ updated `seq`...
This is almost all the footguns of standard imperative programming condensed into a single expression. Like ~half of the "programming"-type bugs I see in code reviews are related to tricky temporal (execution order) logic, combined with mutability, that depend on unclearly specified semantics.
> It's about twisty stupid special symbol meanings.
Some people program in APL/J/K/Q just fine, and they prefer their symbols. Calling it "stupid" is showing your prejudice. (I don't and can't write APL but still respect it)
> What's not fine is to make up bogus comparisons and bogus implications about the people who don't like it.
That's a quite irrational take. I didn't make any bogus comparisons. I justified or can justify all my points. I did not imply anything about people who don't like Raku. I don't even use Raku myself...
> You have the hidden inner iteration loop inside the `.extend` standard library method driving the lazy generator expression with _unspecified_ one-step-at-a-time semantics
That's why it wasn't the first thing I wrote.
> To explain what this does to a beginner, or even intermediate programmer.... oooooh boy.
As if the raku were better in that respect, lol.
> Some people program in APL/J/K/Q just fine, and they prefer their symbols.
APL originally had a lot of its own symbols with very little reuse, and clear rules. Learning the symbols was one thing, but the usage rules were minimal and simple. I'm not a major fan of too many different symbols, but I really hate reuse in any context where how things will be parsed is unclear. In the raku example, what if the elements were to be multiplied?
> Calling it "stupid" is showing your prejudice. (I don't and can't write APL but still respect it)
> Reminds me a bit of the fish anecdote told by DFW...
Yeah, for some reason, it's not OK for me to insult a language, but it's OK for you to insult a person.
But you apparently missed that the "twisty" part was about the multiple meanings. Because both those symbols are used in Python (the * in multiple contexts even) but the rules on parsing them are very simple.
perl and its successor raku are not about simple parsing. You are right to worry about the semantics of execution, but that starts with the semantics of how the language is parsed.
In any case, sure, if you want to be anal about paradigm purity, take my first example, and (1) ignore the print statement because the raku version wasn't doing that anyway, although the OP's python version was, and (2) change the accumulation.
But that won't get you very far in a shop that cares about pythonicity and coding standards.
And...
You can claim all you want that the original was "pure" but that's literally because it did nothing. Not only did it have no side effects, but, unless it was assigned or had something else done with it, the result was null and void.
I made an analogy which just means that it's hard to understand what the different styles and paradigms are when those are the things you constantly use.
You're apparently taking that as an insult...
> But you apparently missed that the "twisty" part
I didn't miss anything. You just didn't explain it. "twisty" does not mean "ambiguous" or "hard to parse". Can't miss what you don't write.
My instincts about raku were always that perl was too fiddly, so why would I want perl 6, and this isn't doing anything to dissuade me from that position.
same. i thought it would have been as quick to pick up as rust. nowhere near. i spent weeks trying to go through every feature of the language at least once. time in which i could’ve read several rust books and already start hacking up some interesting projects. so much in swift is pointless syntax sugar. why do i need 50 ways to do exactly the same thing, it’s just nonsense. then i have to look up the language reference whenever i read a new codebase
well for backend development, yes - I technically never stopped as I had existing projects to maintain. But after trying out Swift a couple times, I've dropped it entirely for backend. For new backend work it's C#/.NET all the way.
I wanted to try using a native language other than C++ and Swift ostensibly seemed easier to pick up. I continue to use Swift for iOS app development though where it is much easier to use; but that has its own share of compromises and trade-offs - but not centred around Swift, around SwiftUI vs UIKit.
Regardless of the language it is written in, one thing that I hope Ladybird will focus on when the time comes is a user-respecting Javascript implementation. Regardless of what the Web standards say, it is unacceptable that websites can (ab)use JS against the users for things such as monitoring presence/activity, disabling paste, and extracting device information beyond what is strictly necessary for an acceptably formatted website. One approach could be to report standardized (spoofed) values across the user base so that Ladybird users are essentially indistinguishable from each other (beyond the originating IP). This is more or less the approach taken by Tor, and where a project like Ladybird could make a real difference.
There's just too many defense mechanisms on popular websites that would simply make Ladybird flagged as a bot and render the website unusable. I wouldn't mind a toggle to switch between this and normal behavior but having that as a default would be bad for wider adoption.
If those "popular websites" are the likes of Facebook and Instagram, I don't see that as a big loss. That being said, I find that most of the Web works just fine on Tor, so it's certainly possible. Most of the issues seem related to the (known) the exit IP being overused or identified as Tor.
> If those "popular websites" are the likes of Facebook and Instagram, I don't see that as a big loss.
Personally I wouldn't mind either but my point is that they probably want to cater to the average person, and not just security conscious tech savvy people, and if that's the case, then you really can't exclude FB/IG/YT and others from working properly in your browser.
> they probably want to cater to the average person, and not just security conscious tech savvy people
Why? The average person is well served by large existing players, whereas security conscious tech people are extremely underserved and often actually willing to pay.
Specific numbers aside, one possible reason is they want to increase adoption to gain user volume, in order to have an effect on the larger ecosystem.
Once you have non-trivial network effects, you could continue to influence the ecosystem (see: MSIE, Firefox in its early days, and Google Chrome). There are probably multiple paths to this. This is one.
Influence isn’t all about the raw numbers - if yours is the browser of choice for developers, that’s going to give you a stronger voice than just being the fourth best browser. Think about Twitter - by all accounts, Twitter’s user numbers were dwarfed by the other networks, but they punched way above their weight because the entire political policy making and reporting apparatus was on there.
Firefox tries to position itself as that secure and private alternative, but this is mostly marketing. For a long time, Chromium had better site isolation, and the default Firefox settings are permissive when it comes to fingerprinting. Out of the box, it seems that Brave wins here, but for now using Brave means accepting a lot of extra commercial stuff that should not be in a browser in the first place (and that increases the attack surface). I have been using the Arkenfox user.js for Firefox, but it's unclear how much good it does or if it isn't counterproductive (by making the the user stand out).
It looked to me like it was just due to recurring build issues. Lots of "swift can't import these conflicting C++ versioned libraries concurrently" and "can't use some operator due to versioning or build conflicts". Basically it sounds like trying to add swift to the project was breaking too many things, and they decided it wasn't worth it.
It's a shame, I think swift is an underappreciated language, however I understand their reasoning. I think if they tried to just use swift from the beginning it would have been too ambitious, and trying to add swift to a fragile, massive project was probably too complex.
Why did Ladybird even attempt this with Swift, but (I presume) not with Rust? If they're going to go to the trouble of adding another language, does Rust not have a better history of C++ interop? Not to mention, Swift's GC doesn't seem great for the browser's performance.
Well they already chose Swift over Rust because they said:
> Swift is strictly better in OO support and C++ interop
So I guess from their point of view that’s why not rust.
I don’t have a horse in the race.
I was genuinely interested in why they didn’t even consider D given they already ruled out rust for those particular reasons, for which it seems D would fulfill nicely.
> Swift is strictly better in OO support and C++ interop
Fascinating.
They've shown the idea it is better on C++ interop is wrong.
I don't know enough to say Rust has same OO support as Swift, but I'm pretty sure it does. (my guess as a former Swift dev: "protocol oriented programming" was a buzzy thing that would have sounded novel, but amounted to "use traits" in rust parlance)
EDIT: Happy to hear a reply re: why downvotes, -3 is a little wild, given current replies don't raise any issues.
Rust has straightforward support for every part of OOP other than implementation inheritance, and even implementation inheritance can be rephrased elegantly as the generic typestate pattern. (The two are effectively one and the same; if anything, generic typestate is likely more general.)
> Rust has straightforward support for every part of OOP other than implementation inheritance
Except the only thing that makes OOP OOP: Message passing.
Granted, Swift only just barely supports it, and only for the sake of interop with Objective-C. Still, Swift has better OO support because of it. Rust doesn't even try.
Not that OOP is much of a goal. There is likely good reason why Smalltalk, Objective-C, and Ruby are really the only OOP languages in existence (some esoteric language nobody has ever heard of notwithstanding).
I’m pretty sure when the Ladybird team said “Swift has strictly better OOP support”, they were not referring to ObjC style message passing, so it’s not even relevant.
I'm pretty sure your guessing is silly. I assume you are trying to be here in good faith, so make your case. Since it is not support for message passing, what else makes Swift have "strictly better OOP support"?
That's the thing man, there isn't anything. It was an odd thing in the tweet to say that it has better OOP.
(source: iOS dev from jailbreak days, so like 8 years before Swift, till 2019. He did not mean dynamic dispatch and Swift has dynamic dispatch by way of "you can annotate a Swift method with @objc and we'll emit it as an ObjC method instead of Swift", not Smalltalk-ish, like, at all. if you're the poster who originally said "because of dynamic dispatch", I understand why you're frustrated but I have 0 idea why you think dynamic dispatch in Swift would matter, much less say it makes Swift much better at OOP than Rust. It's impolite to say "utterly baffling engineering decision" in public, so there's subtext in the conversation. Namely that both claims made 0 sense if you had practical familiarity with either)
But that's the thing, there is: It supports message passing.
Like we already discussed long ago, it supports it poorly, and only for the sake of compatibility with Objective-C, but still that makes its OOP support better than Rust's. Rust has no OOP support at all. It is not an OOP language and never would want to be. OOP goes completely against its core principles (statically-typed, performance-minded).
Realistically, nobody would consider Swift an OOP language either. However, on the spectrum, it is unquestionably closer to being an OOP language. It at least gets an honourable mention in the short list of OOP languages. It is undeniable that Swift has "better" OOP support; not to be confused with good OOP support.
> He did not mean dynamic dispatch
Of course not. Dynamic dispatch is for function calling. OOP doesn't use dynamic dispatch. That's literally why we call it object-oriented rather than function-oriented (or functional, as the kids say). This is also why Objective-C, quite brilliantly, uses [foo bar] syntax (hint: it kind of looks like an ASCII-art envelope for a reason): To make it clear that conceptually you are not calling a function.
Ok, I've now read through the rest of this thread and I think I understand where you're coming from, but I also think you're making my point for me.
You're using a definition of OOP where only Smalltalk-style message passing counts. By that definition, you're right: Swift is closer, because `@objc` exists. But by that definition, neither Swift nor Rust is an OOP language in any meaningful sense, and the delta between them is mass-of-the-electron tiny. Swift's message passing support is an annotation that is a compatibility shim for a 40-year-old runtime, not a design philosophy.
So when you say Swift has "better OO support"... sure, in the same way that my car has better submarine support than yours because I left the windows cracked and water could theoretically get in. Technically true! Not useful!
The Ladybird team are C++ developers evaluating languages for a browser engine. When C++ developers say "OOP" they mean classes, inheritance hierarchies, virtual methods. The DOM is a giant inheritance tree. That's the context. You can tell them they're using the word wrong, but that doesn't change what they meant, and what they meant is the only thing that matters for understanding whether the claim made sense.
And under their definition-which is also the definition used by mass, essentially every working programmer and every university curriculum for the last 30 years-Swift and Rust are actually pretty close, which was my original point. Swift has `class` with inheritance, Rust has traits and composition. Neither is Smalltalk. The claim that Swift is "strictly better" was weird no matter which definition you pick.
(Also, and I say this respectfully: characterizing C++/Java/Rust as "functional programming" because they encapsulate data with functions is... a take. I get the logic chain you're following but that is not a definition that will help anyone communicate with anyone else, which is presumably the point of definitions.)
> When C++ developers say "OOP" they mean classes, inheritance hierarchies, virtual methods.
Okay, but for that to be true in this case then you must explain how Swift has "better OOP support". If there is no rational explanation for now Swift has "better OOP support" by the metrics you are imagining, as you, me, and everyone else has alluded to earlier, then clearly that isn't what they meant.
> I get the logic chain you're following but that is not a definition that will help anyone communicate with anyone else
Won't help communicate with anyone else meaning that you are the only one capable of understanding the logic chain? I'm sure you are a talented guy, but the world isn't exactly lacking in talented people. I'm sorry to say, but most everyone on HN will have absolutely no trouble understanding this.
> Okay, but for that to be true in this case then you must explain how Swift has "better OOP support" by that token.
I did. Swift has `class` types with implementation inheritance. Rust does not. If you're porting a C++ codebase with deep class hierarchies (like, say, a browser DOM), Swift lets you transliterate those hierarchies directly. Rust makes you rethink them into composition and traits. That's a real difference that matters to a team mid-migration, and it's an extremely rational explanation for why a C++ dev would say Swift has "strictly better OOP support."
You don't have to agree it's a large difference (I don't, which was my original point), but "there is no rational explanation" just isn't true. There's a very obvious one, it's just boring.
> If there is no rational explanation, as you, me, and everyone else has alluded to earlier, then clearly that isn't what they meant.
My position was never "there is no rational explanation." My position was "the difference is small enough that 'strictly better' was a weird thing to say." Those are different claims! You're kind of merging me into your argument when we don't actually agree.
> Won't help communicate with anyone else meaning that you are the only one capable of understanding the logic chain?
No, I meant that if you say "C++ is a functional programming language" to mass, any working programmer, they will not understand you, because that is not what those words mean to them. It's not about intelligence, it's about shared vocabulary. You've built a internally-consistent taxonomy where functional = data + functions, OOP = data + message passing, and imperative = data and functions separate. I can follow it fine. But you've redefined three terms that already have widespread, different meanings, and then you're treating disagreement as confusion. That's the communication problem.
I'm certainly not clever enough to have built it. Not to mention that the person who coined OOP is quite famous for having done so. I am not him, I can assure you. I have merely ingested it from what is out there in widespread circulation.
I can appreciate that you live in a different bubble and what is widespread there is not the same. It's a pretty big world out there. However, it doesn't really matter as if "C++ is a functional programming language" doesn't jive with your understanding, as you'll simply ask: "What ever do you mean?" and which point "functional programming language" will be defined and a shared understanding will be reached.
This isn't the problem you are imagining.
> I did.
Right. Seems we encountered a communication barrier again. "That's the thing man, there isn't anything." in my world would read "That's the thing man, there are things and here they are: ..." However, this highlights again that it doesn't actually harm communication as further clarification follows and eventually everyone will reach a shared understanding. Communication isn't some kind of TV game show where you have to get the right answer on your first try. This is not a problem in any way, shape, or form.
> I'm certainly not clever enough to have built it.
Ha, don't sell yourself short, you're doing a great job defending it.
> However, it doesn't really matter as if "C++ is a functional programming language" doesn't jive with your understanding, you'll simply ask: "What ever do you mean?"
Okay, genuinely, let's try this exercise. You say to me "C++ is a functional programming language." I ask "What ever do you mean?" You say "data is grouped with functions." I say "...that's also true of Python, JavaScript, Kotlin, Scala, Dart, TypeScript, and basically every language designed after 1990. What term do you use for Haskell?" And now we're in another 20-message thread defining terms from scratch instead of talking about the actual thing.
Like, you've got a taxonomy where imperative/functional/OOP is a clean trichotomy based on how data relates to code. That's elegant! But it also means "functional programming" contains both Haskell and Java, which in practice need to be distinguished from each other far more often than they need to be grouped together. The Kay-pure definitions give you clean categories at the cost of useful ones.
*Obj-C doesn't even pass muster of the Kay-pure definition, which renders the whole conversation moot.*
> "That's the thing man, there isn't anything." in my world would read "That's the thing man, there are things and here they are: ..."
Okay, fair hit. :) What I meant was: there's nothing that would make a C++ team say "strictly better." Swift has classes with inheritance, sure. But "strictly better" implies Rust can't even get close, and it can-you just model things differently. The Ladybird team discovered this themselves, which is... kind of the whole story here? They said "strictly better OOP support," tried it, and now have removed Swift. The claim didn't survive contact with their own codebase. That was the entire point of my original comment sitting at -3. (now at +2)
> Communication isn't some kind of TV game show where you have to get the right answer on your first try.
No, but Hacker News comments at -3 do get grayed out and collapsed, so in practice it kind of is, unfortunately.
In the context of the dimension we have been talking about, it is also functional. There is no difference between Haskell, Python, Java, etc. in that particular dimension. All of those languages you list are quite different in other dimensions, of course. Are you under the impression that programming languages are one dimensional? Unfortunately, that is not the case.
> And now we're in another 20-message thread defining terms from scratch instead of talking about the actual thing.
Especially when we find out that what we really wanted to talk about was type systems. Thinking of programming languages as being one dimensional is a fool's errand.
> But it also means "functional programming" contains both Haskell and Java, which in practice need to be distinguished from each other far more often than they need to be grouped together.
Right, there may be a need to separate them, but sensibly you would separate them on the dimension that is relevant to the separation intent, not some other arbitrary quality. For example, perhaps your interest is in separating mutability and immutability. Therefore, something like "Haskell is an immutable-by-default programming language" would be an appropriate statement in that desired context. "Haskell is a statically-typed programming language", not so much.
> No, but Hacker News comments at -3 do get grayed out and collapsed, so in practice it kind of is, unfortunately.
I'll still read your comments if they turn grey. I don't care about what color they are. This isn't a problem.
You can, but then you don't get any of what OOP actually offers. Message passing isn't the same thing as dynamic dispatch. OOP is a very different paradigm.
I think you are both unknowingly talking past each other: my understanding is that Smalltalk-style "object-oriented programming" ("everything is a message!") is quite distinct from C++/C#/Java/Rust "object-oriented programming" ("my structs have methods!")
They are both OOP, just as a "football" can be either spherical or oblong.
Functional programming is not "encapsulating data in 'objects'". Such a model would naturally feature methods like "void Die.roll()", "void list.Add(element)" which are definitely not functional programming (which emphasizes immutability, pure functions, composition, etc.)
> They are both OOP, just as a "football" can be either spherical or oblong.
They are both OOP like a football can be something that you use in a sport and something that flies you to the moon. Except it is not clear what flies you to the moon goes by "football".
> Such a model would naturally feature methods like "void Die.roll()", "void list.Add(element)" which are definitely not functional programming
Exactly, functional programming. `Die` and `list` encapsulate data and use higher order functions to operate on it, which is what defines functional programming.
> which emphasizes [...] pure functions
Functions without encapsulation is imperative programming. If you introduce encapsulation then, yes, you have functional programming, just like your examples above.
Immutability is a disjoined property that can optionally apply to all of these programming paradigms. OOP, functional, and imperative programs can all be immutable, or not.
Composition and encapsulation go hand in hand, so that one is also functional programming, yes. And certainly composition is core to languages like C++/Java/Rust/etc. Naturally, them being functional languages.
To reiterate:
- Imperative programming: Data and functions are separate.
- Functional programming: Data is grouped with functions.
- Object-oriented programming: Data is grouped with message
responders.
You're welcome to insist that your definitions are canonical ("the objective in football is to kick the ball into the net"), but they are at odds with the rest of the thread
Just as you are welcome to come up with other definitions. Although last time you tried they ended up being quite inconsistent, so one does need to be careful if you want them to be useful.
These definitions are not at odds with the discussion at hand at all. It was clearly stated that Swift has better OO support. Which is obviously true because it tries to be compatible with Objective-C, and therefore needs to have some level of OO support. That is something that Rust has no interest in doing, and rightfully so.
Your redefinition violates the claim, and therefore we can logically determine that it is not what was being used in the rest of the thread. That is, aside from the confused Rust guy that set this tangent in motion, but the remainder of this thread was merely clarifying to him what was originally intended. "He has a different definition for OOP" doesn't really help his understanding. That is what this thread branch has always been about, so it is not clear where you are trying to go with that.
I think we have seen enough since the best example of a Rust browser that is Servo, has taken them 14 years to reach v0.0.1.
So the approach of having a new language that requires a full rewrite (even with an LLM) is still a bad approach.
Fil-C likely can do the job without a massive rewrite and achieving safety for C and C++.
Job done.
EDIT: The authors of Ladybird have already dismissed using Rust, and with Servo progressing at a slow pace it clearly shows that Ladybird authors do not want something like that to happen to the project.
Until just a couple years ago, Servo had been a pure research project with no goal of ever releasing a full browser (and it was abandoned by Mozilla in 2020).
Igalia had five engineers working full time who turned that science project into v0.0.1 in less than two years.
Only few isolated parts were integrated into Firefox, everything else was simply thrown away and abandoned, and IMO it was for a good reason.
I've been programming in Rust for 5 years and I could barely understand the code in their repo. Not because it was somehow advanced but because it didn't make any sense. It felt like that with every decision they could make, they always chose the hardest way.
On the other hand, I have never done any C++ (besides few tutorials) in my life and yet I found both Serenity/Ladybird and also WebKit to be very readable and understandable.
BTW: If anyone wants to reply that Rust is different then yes, of course it is - but that's the point, if there is a language that maps nicely to your problem domain, it's also very fast, and well-understood then why the hell you'd use a language that is well-known to NOT map to OOP?
The RUST ecosystem barely just started getting into shape on the GUI toolkits frontend... So perhaps save your criticisms for something that wasn't born out of the vacuum.
They demonstrated that swift's c++ interop isn't good enough, but does it follow that rust's is better? Genuinely asking, as I don't have experience with that. I would imagine that if they rejected it for that reason originally they forsaw even more severe issues.
> Why did Ladybird even attempt this with Swift, but (I presume) not with Rust? I
Probably the same reason why Rust is problematic in game development. The borrow checker and idiomatic Rust do not go well together with things that demand cyclic dependencies/references. Obviously there are ways around it but they're not very ergonomic/productive.
Binding to C++ is an extremely difficult and complex problem for any language that is similarly rich and has lots of (seemingly) equivalent features. The number of subtle incompatibilities and edge cases becomes nearly endless. It's not surprising that some C++ code can't be bound properly.
Yeah, that's what I realised. But I just wanted to mention that this is not what I was expecting from "excellent" interop. I would say that C has excellent interop, in general.
I did this a long time ago as Swift calling Objective-C++ which can call C++ libs, in that case OpenCV. So it wasn't awful but did require making an ObjC++ wrapper, unless I did something wrong which is also possible.
Andreas Kling said Rust lacks OO, which he says is useful for GUI coding.
He even made an attempt at creating his own language, Jakt, under SerenityOS, but perhaps
felt that C++ (earlier with, now without Swift) were the pragmatic choice for Ladybird.
Rust initially started as a hobby project of a person who happened to be a Mozilla employee and later got sponsored by the foundation however it was not a language that was specifically designed with browsers in mind.
The language's largest project before it hit 1.0 was Servo. The language wasn't designed for browsers, but it certainly was informed by them and their struggles with maintaining and developing Firefox.
Do your hobbies revolve around the benefits for your employer? I don't mean it in a snarky way either, but given that Rust was initially written in OCaml, you could see how it could go like "I like programming, I like type systems but I want something procedural over functional so let me give it a go".
It can be described as a hobby project only in the sense that his employer would probably prefer that he spend all his time working on Firefox.
Tools to do X better are often designed by people who get paid a lot to do X and worry about losing their job if they are not good enough at X.
If he were to tell me that he didn't imagine Rust's helping with browser dev when he designed Rust, then I'd believe him, but the "circumstantial" evidence points strongly in the other direction.
> Rust designed specifically for being a language for developing a rendering engine
Rust was born at Mozilla, sort of. It was created by a Mozilla employee. The first "real" project to put it into action was Servo of which parts were adopted into Firefox. While Rust may not have been developed "specifically" to create a browser, it is a fair comment.
That said, Ladybird was started as part of the SerenityOS project. That entire project was built using C++. If the original goal of Serenity was to build an opeerating system, C++ would have felt like a reasonable choice at the time.
By the time Ladybird was looking for "better" languages than C++, Ladybird was already a large project and was making very heavy use of traditional OOP. Rust was evaluated but rejected because it did not support OOP well. Or, at least, it did not support integration into a large, C++ based, OOP project.
Perhaps, if Ladybird had first selected a languge to write a browser from scratch, they would have gone with Rust. We will never know,
We do know that Mozilla, despite being the de facto stewards of Rust at the time, and having a prototype web browser written in Rust (Servo), decided to drop both Rust and Servo. So, perhaps using Rust for browsers is not as open and shut as you imply.
As someone who was on that team for a long time, we took that into consideration, but it was never specifically for that. There was some stuff the Servo team would have liked us to have implemented that we didn’t.
I think that's fair. Funny to have a language that makes it prohibitively difficult to use most of the core computer science constructs (lists, graphs etc.).
I so wholeheartedly agree. You are making a new web browser - akin to a new OS - and you want it open source for everybody but you choose swift not rust?
Lots of people seem really committed to OOP. Rust is definitely a bad fit if you can't imagine writing code without classes and objects. I don't think this makes rust is a bad language for the problem. Its just, perhaps, makes rust a bad language for some programmers.
It doesn't seem uncommon for someone to generally like Rust but still want to use something OO for UI. I'm in that boat. Never liked OOP much, but it makes sense sometimes.
Implementation inheritance can be achieved with good old shared functions that take trait arguments, like this:
fn paint_if_visible<W>(widget: &W, ctx: &mut PaintCtx)
where
W: HasBounds + HasVisibility,
{
if widget.is_visible() {
ctx.paint_rect(widget.bounds());
}
}
You can also define default methods at the trait level.
This all ends up being much more precise, clear, and strongly typed than the typical OO inheritance model, while still following a similar overall structure.
You can see real world examples of this kind of thing in the various GUI toolkits for Rust, like Iced, gpui, egui, Dioxus, etc.
But it's not "kinda how you can do it in C". Traits are a core feature of Rust, any non-trivial Rust program uses them. Traits alone give you polymorphism across disparate types, exactly as in OO - actually better than standard OO (without interfaces), because trait polymorphism works without requiring inheritance from a common ancestor.
> Especially because there's no GC.
This is the only real issue I can think of. However, for implementing something like a UI, automatic GC isn't really necessary because the lifetime of widgets etc. maps very well to the lexical/RAII model. Windows own widgets, etc. Again, see all the UI toolkits implemented in Rust.
I know the Rust trait system has an answer to every OO concept. Another is that data field inheritance is replaced by composition. But these are more workarounds for the rarer cases you want to do OO in Rust, not the intended usual path, and doing OOP this way will get tedious. Otherwise, there'd be no difference and everyone would call Rust an OO language.
Not so sure about not needing GC. Many times a problem seems easy without GC until you get into the weeds. Like why did ObjC feel the need to add ARC (not GC but similar goal)?
> But these are more workarounds for the rarer cases you want to do OO in Rust, not the intended usual path, and doing OOP this way will get tedious.
It sounds like you're speculating. But this doesn't match the reality of actual Rust code. For example, here's the complete, actual code for the `Widget` trait implementation for the `Button` struct in the egui framework:
This is OO code. It's just that it's trait-oriented, not class-oriented. But that's a good thing, not a drawback. Traits are more precise, more flexible, more type-safe, and don't conflate multiple unrelated concerns in a single feature the way class inheritance does. OO languages like Java support a very similar approach, via interfaces.
You can find similar code in any Rust GUI library, and indeed in almost any non-trivial Rust program.
> Otherwise, there'd be no difference and everyone would call Rust an OO language.
Rust is not a class-based OO language. But the fact that one of its core features, traits, have "methods", and those methods have a first argument traditionally named `self` should be a clue. Trait-based OO is very much OO. Whether "Rust is an OO language" depends on how strictly you want to define "OO" to match the rather obsolete 1970s conception of it.
This is why the first question I asked you was "What OO features are you thinking of that Rust doesn't have?" Because "OO" is a broad label that covers a wide range of different features.
Rust doesn't have "classes", but classes are a 1970s-era mish-mash of a whole bunch of different concerns munged together into a single poorly-factored construct. Now, half a century later, that's well understood, and better solutions exist in the form of traits and interfaces, and related capabilities.
> Like why did ObjC feel the need to add ARC (not GC but similar goal)?
Same reason Rust includes `Rc` and `Arc`. A general-purpose language has to provide some solution to memory management based on reachability. Reference counting and tracing GC are common solutions to that. Rust's static memory management plus RC is plenty good enough for GUI applications.
Indeed, chapter 18 in The Book stops short of claiming that Rust is object oriented. But it's clearly written to highlight the good parts of object-oriented design that Rust has adopted.
Every "OO for UI" approach I've seen breaks most of the rules of object-oriented design.
GTK, Qt, DOM, WinUI 3, Swing, Jetpack Compose, and GWT (to name a few) all provide getters and setters or public properties for GUI state, violating the encapsulation principle [1]. The TextBox/EditBox/Entry control is the perfect example.
The impedance mismatch is that a GUI control is not an object [2]. And yet, all of the object-orient GUI examples listed implement their controls as objects. The objects are not being used for the strengths of OO, it's just an implementation detail for a procedural API. The reason these GUIs don't provide an API like shown in [1] is because it's an impractical design.
"How are you supposed to design an OO TextEdit GUI control if it can't provide a getter/setter for the text that it owns?" Exactly. You're not supposed to. OOP is not the right model for GUIs.
Ironically, SwiftUI doesn't have this problem because it uses the Elm Architecture [3] like React and iced.
[2]: From [1], "All the rules in the rule-of-thumb list above essentially say the same thing — that the inner state of an object must be hidden. In fact, the last rule in the list (“All objects must provide their own UI”) really just follows from the others. If access to the inner state of an object is impossible, then the UI, which by necessity must access the state information, must be created by the object whose state is being displayed."
Not too surprising. Swift is too tied to Apple and it's not really clear what the benefit would be relative to a subset of C++ written with contemporary memory safety practices. It's a battle tested choice and pretty much every browser actually in use is written in C++.
> It's a battle tested choice and pretty much every browser actually in use is written in C++.
Every browser in use is stuck with C++ because they're in way too deep at this point, but Chromium and Firefox are both chipping away at it bit by bit and replacing it with safer alternatives where they feasibly can. Chromium even blocked JPEG-XL adoption until there was a safe implementation because they saw the reference C++ decoder as such a colossal liability.
IMO the takeaway is that although those browsers do use a ton of C++ and probably always will, their hard-won lessons have led them to wish they didn't have to, and to write a brand new browser in C++ is just asking to needlessly repeat all of the same mistakes. Chromium uses C++ because Webkit used C++ because KHTML used C++ in 1998. Today we have the benefit of hindsight.
> Chromium even blocked JPEG-XL adoption until there was a safe implementation because they saw the reference C++ decoder as such a colossal liability.
Quickly followed by several vulnerabilities in that reference library as well; good move
TBF that's less a C++ thing and more that there have been several high profile decoder vulnerabilities over the past however many years. Enough that Google created the custom language WUFFS for the express purpose of implementing secure parsers for arbitrary file formats.
It's emblematic of C++ devs penchant for not implementing error handling on invalid input because of the "safety net" of exceptions and not bothering to properly handle errors or exceptions.
It's probably okay to solve one problem at a time: first solve the "free open source browser, developed from the Web standard specs" problem in an established language (C++), and then the "reimplement all of part of it in a more suitable (safer, higher productivity) language - yet to be devised - problem.
And Andreas Kling already proved the naysayers wrong when he showd that a new operating system and Web browser can be written entirely from scratch, the former not even using any standard libraries; so beware when you are inclined to say 'not feasible'.
Maybe? I feel like there's been lots of efforts to migrate large C++ codebases over the years, and few actually complete the migration. Heck, Google is even making Carbon to try to solve this.
migrating any large project is going to be billions of dollars worth of labor. Language isn't a large factor in that cost, you can save few tens of millions at most with a better language.
The large factor is the amount of work to create everything again. Plenty has been written about large re-writes, they can and have worked out in the long run, but generally it takes a decade for the new to be as good as the old - either it is missing critical features or it has too many bugs.
> a subset of C++ written with contemporary memory safety practices
What is this mythical subset of C++? Does it include use of contemporary STL features like string_view? (Don’t get me wrong — modern STL is considerably improved, but it’s not even close to being memory-safe.)
Ladybird inherits its C++ from SerenityOS. Ladybird has an almost completely homegrown standard library including their own pointer classes and a couple of different string classes that do some interesting things with memory. But perhaps the most novel stuff are things like TRY and MUST:
https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/blob/master/Documenta...
You see this reflected all the way back to the main function. Here is the main entry function for the entire browser:
If Ladybird is successful, I would not be surprised to see its standard library take off with other projects. Again, it is really the SerenityOS standard library but the SerenityOS founder left the project to focus on Ladybird. So, that is where this stuff evolves now.
So interesting to hear about the internals of the browser, how it evolved from a standard library in an OS project. It's the kind of insight that's rarely documented, spoken about, or even known to anybody other than the author.
I can totally imagine how a prolific and ambitious developer would create a world of their own, essentially another language with domain-specific vocabulary and primitives. People often talk about using a "subset of C++" to make it manageable for mortals, and I think the somewhat unusual consideration of Swift was related to this desire for an ergonomic language to express and solve the needs of the project.
memory safety isn't really much of a problem with modern C++. We have the range library now for instance. What's nice about modern C++ is you can almost avoid most manual loops and talk at the algorithm level.
Are we talking about the same range library? The one that showed up in C++20 and is basically just iterator pairs dressed up nicely? The one where somehow the standard thought all memory safety issues with iterations could be summed up with a single “borrowed” bit? The one where instead of having a nice loop you can also build a little loop body pipeline and pass it as a parameter and have exactly the same iterator invalidation and borrowing problems that C++ has had since day 1?
Having a checklist of "things not to do" is historically a pretty in effectiveway to ensure memory safety, which is why the parent comment was asking for details. The fact that this type of thing gets dismissed as a non-issue is honestly a huge part of the problem in my opinion; it's time to move on from pretending this is a skill issue.
Servo is slowly but steadily getting there. The thing with Servo is that it's highly modularized and some of its components are widely used by the larger Rust ecosystem, even it the whole browser engine isn't. So there's multi-pronged vested interest in developing it.
Moreover, Servo aims to be embeddable (there are some working examples already), which is where other non-Chrome/ium browsers are failing (and Firefox too).
Thanks to this it has much better chance at wider adoption and actually spawning multiple browsers.
> The thing with Servo is that it's highly modularized and some of its components are widely used by the larger Rust ecosystem, even it the whole browser engine isn't.
Alas not nearly as modularized as it could be. I think it's mainly just Stylo and WebRender (the components that got pulled into Firefox), and html5ever (the HTML parser) that are externally consumable.
Text and layout support are two things that could easily be ecosystem modules but aren't seemingly (from my perspective) because the ambition to be modular has been lost.
I've seen recent talk about swappable js engine, so I'm unsure about the ambition being lost.
I'm eyeing Blitz too (actually tried to use it in one of my projects but the deps fucked me up).
Servo's history is much more complicated and originally was planned to be used for the holo lens before the layoff. Comparing trajectory doesn't make sense they had completely different goals and directions.
What are you talking about? It doesn't have a "browser", it has a testing shell. For a time there was actual attempt with the Verso experiment but it got shelved just recently.
Servo is working at being embeddable at the same time when Rust GUI toolkits are maturing. Once it gets embedding stabilized that will be the time for a full blown browser developement.
> It doesn't have a "browser", it has a testing shell.
So, yes it is still pre-historic.
> Once it gets embedding stabilized that will be the time for a full blown browser developement.
Servo development began in 2012. [0] 14 years later we get a v0.0.1.
At this point, Ladybird will likely reach 1.0 faster than Servo could, and the latter is not even remotely close to being usable even in 14 years of waiting.
> At this point, Ladybird will likely reach 1.0 faster than Servo could, and the latter is not even remotely close to being usable even in 14 years of waiting.
This is disingenuous. Servo is using RUST, language which grew together with it, pretty much, and all components surrounding it.
C++ is how old, please remind me?
Well, it was a terrible idea in any case unless it was for high-level-ish code only. Swift generally can't compete with C++ in raw performance (in the same way as Java - yeah, there are benchmarks where it's faster, but it basically doesn't happen in real programs).
Hurray for micro benchmarks. Anyway, every language can be abused. I can make Java run slower than Ruby. Given that it runs on Microcontrollers on billions of devices, I don't think Swift is necessarily the problem in whatever case you have in mind (And yes I stole oracle's java marketing there for Swift, it is true though.)
It wasn't the reason why it was removed, but, well we agree, it would have been a problem if used indiscriminately. I didn't do any additional research, but what I read in public was simply "Ladybird is going to use Swift".
Hi, I'm the one who originally wrote Ladybird's AppKit UI. Just FYI, it was written long before Ladybird split from SerenityOS, and even longer before Swift was on the table. I only chose Objective-C++ because it was the language I was familiar with at the time :)
For their sake, I hope not. I don't think an outside-donation-financed project with this much ADD can survive in the long term.
It's frustrating to discuss. It is a wonderful case study in how not to make engineering management decisions, and yet, they've occurred over enough time, and the cause is appealing enough, that it's hard to talk about out loud in toto without sounding like a dismissive jerk.
> From what I can tell they're pretty laser focused on making a browser
I agree with you. I also agree that this decision is an example of that.
SerenityOS had an "everything from scratch in one giant mono-repo" rule. It was, explicitly a hobby project and one rooted in enjoyment and 'idealism from the get go. It was founded by a man looking for something productive to focus on instead of drugs. It was therapy. Hence the name.
Ladybird, as an independent project, was founded with the goal of being the only truly independent web browser (independent from corporate control generally and Google specifically).
They have been very focussed on that, have not had any sacred cows, and have shed A LOT of the home-grown infrastructure they inherited from being part of SerenityOS. Sometimes that saddens me a little but there is no denying that it has sped them up.
Their progress has been incredible. This comment is being written in Ladybird. I have managed GitHub projects in Ladybird. I have sent Gmail messages in Ladybird. It is not "ready" but it blows my mind how close it is.
I think Ladybid will be a "usable" browser before we enter 2027. That is just plain amazing.
Yeah, Serenityos was build everything from scratch for fun. Ladybird is build where an alternative implementation is going to add value. No need to get sidetracked reinventing SSL or ffmpeg.
Swift never felt truly open source either. That people can propose evolution points doesn’t change the fact that Apple still holds all the keys and pushes whatever priorities they need, even if they’re not a good idea (e.g. Concurrency, Swift Testing etc)
Also funny enough, all cross platform work is with small work groups, some even looking for funding … anyway.
Apple has been always 'transactional' when it comes to OSS - they open source things only when it serves a strategic purpose. They open-sourced Swift only because they needed the community to build an ecosystem around their platform.
Yeah, well, sure they've done some work around LLVM/Clang, WebKit, CUPS, but it's really not proportional to the size and the influence they still have.
Compare them to Google, with - TensorFlow, k8s, Android (nominally), Golang, Chrome, and a long tail of other shit. Or Meta - PyTorch and the Llama model series. Or even Microsoft, which has dramatically reversed course from its "open source is a cancer" era (yeah, they were openly saying that, can you believe it?) to becoming one of the largest contributors on GitHub.
Apple I've heard even have harshest restrictions about it - some teams are just not permitted to contribute to OSS in any way. Obsessively secretive and for what price? No wonder that Apple's software products are just horrendously bad, if not all the time - well, too often. And on their own hardware too.
I wouldn't mind if Swift dies, I'm glad Objective-C is no longer relevant. In fact, I can't wait for Swift to die sooner.
Sort of an exception that proves the rule. Yes, it's great and was released for free. But at least partially that's not a strategic decision from Apple but just a requirement of the LGPLv2 license[1] under which they received it (as KHTML) originally.
And even then, it was Blink and not WebKit that ended up providing better value to the community.
[1] It does bear pointing out that lots of the new work is dual-licensed as 2-clause BSD also. Though no one is really trying to test a BSD-only WebKit derivative, as the resulting "Here's why this is not a derived work of the software's obvious ancestor" argument would be awfully dicey to try to defend. The Ship of Theseus is not a recognized legal principle, and clean rooms have historically been clean for a reason.
>> some teams are just not permitted to contribute to OSS in any way
My understanding is that by default you are not allowed to contribute to open-source even if its your own project. Exceptions are made for teams whose function is to work on those open-source project e.g. Swift/LLVM/etc...
I talked to an apple engineer at a bar years ago and he said they aren’t allowed to work on _anything_ including side projects without getting approval first. Seemed like a total wtf moment to me.
I have never had a non wtf moment talking to an apple software engineer at a bar.
I can recall one explaining to me in the mid 20 teens that the next iPhone would be literally impossible to jailbreak in any capacity with 100% confidence.
I could not understand how someone that capable(he was truly bright) could be that certain. That is pure 90s security arrogance. The only secure computer is one powered off in a vault, and even then I am not convinced.
Multiple exploits were eventually found anyway.
We never exchanged names. That’s the only way to interact with engineers like that and talk in real terms.
Every programming job I've ever had, I've been required at certain points to make open source contributions. Granted, that was always "we have an issue with this OSS library/software we use, your task this sprint is to get that fixed".
I won't say never, but it would take an exceedingly large comp plan for me to sign paperwork forbidding me from working on hobby projects. That's pretty orwellian. I'm not allowed to work on hobby projects on company time, but that seems fair, since I also can't spend work hours doing non-programming hobbies either.
No, as far as I know, at Apple, this is strict - you cannot contribute to OSS, period. Not from your own equipment nor your friend's, not even during a vacation. It may cost you your job. Of course, it's not universal for every team, but on teams I know a few people - that's what I heard. Some companies just don't give a single fuck of what you want or need, or where your ideals lie.
I suspect it's not just Apple, I have "lost" so many good GitHub friends - incredible artisans and contributors, they've gotten well-payed jobs and then suddenly... not a single green dot on the wall since. That's sad. I hope they're getting paid more than enough.
The fact that Swift is an Apple baby should indeed be considered a red flag. I know there are some Objective-C lovers out there but I think it is an abomination.
Apple is (was?) good at hardware design and UX, but they pretty bad at producing software.
For what it’s worth, ObjC is not Apple’s brainchild. It just came along for the ride when they chose NEXTSTEP as the basis for Mac OS X.
I haven’t used it in a couple decades, but I do remember it fondly. I also suspect I’d hate it nowadays. Its roots are in a language that seemed revolutionary in the 80s and 90s - Smalltalk - and the melding of it with C also seemed revolutionary at the time. But the very same features that made it great then probably (just speculating - again I haven’t used it in a couple decades) aren’t so great now because a different evolutionary tree leapfrogged ahead of it. So most investment went into developing different solutions to the same problems, and ObjC, like Smalltalk, ends up being a weird anachronism that doesn’t play so nicely with modern tooling.
I've never written whole applications in ObjC but have had to dabble with it as part of Ardour (ardour.org) implementation details for macOS.
I think it's a great language! As long as you can tolerate dynamic dispatch, you really do get the best of C/C++ combined with its run-time manipulable object type system. I have no reason to use it for more code than I have to, but I never grimace if I know I'm going to have to deal with it. Method swizzling is such a neat trick!
It is, and that’s part of what I loved about it. But it’s also the kind of trick that can quickly become a source of chaos on a project with many contributors and a lot of contributor churn, like we tend to get nowadays. Because - and this was the real point of Dijkstra’s famous paper; GOTO was just the most salient concrete example at the time - control flow mechanisms tend to be inscrutable in proportion to their power.
And, much like what happened to GOTO 40 years ago, language designers have invented less powerful language features that are perfectly acceptable 90% solutions. e.g. nowadays I’d generally pick higher order functions or the strategy pattern over method swizzling because they’re more amenable to static analysis and easier to trace with typical IDE tooling.
I don't really want to defend method swizzling (it's grotesque from some entirely reasonable perspectives). However, it does work on external/3rd party code (e.g. audio plugins) even when you don't have control over their source code. I'm not sure you can pull that off with "better" approaches ...
Many of the built-in types in Objective C all have names beginning with “NS” like “NSString”. The NS stands for NeXTSTEP. I always found it insane that so many years later, every iPhone on Earth was running software written in a language released in the 80s. It’s definitely a weird language, but really quite pleasant once you get used to it, especially compared to other languages from the same time period. It’s truly remarkable they made something with such staying power.
>It’s truly remarkable they made something with such staying power
What has had the staying power is the API because that API is for an operating system that has had that staying power. As you hint, the macOS of today is simply the evolution of NeXTSTEP (released in 1989). And iOS is just a light version of it.
But 1989 is not all that remarkable. The Linux API (POSIX) was introduced in 1988 but started in 1984 and based on an API that emerged in the 70s. And the Windows API goes back to 1985. Apple is the newest API of the three.
As far as languages go, the Ladybird team is abandoning Swift to stick with C++ which was released back in 1979. And of course C++ is just an evolution of C which goes back to 1972 and which almost all of Linux is still written in.
And what is Ladybird even? It is an HTML interpretter. HTML was introduced in 1993. Guess what operating system HTML and the first web browser was created on. That is right...NeXTSTEP.
In some ways ObjC’s and the NEXTSTEP API’s staying power is more impressive because they survived the failure of their relatively small patron organization. POSIX and C++ were developed at and supported by tech titans - the 1970s and 1980s equivalents of FAANG. Meanwhile back at the turn of the century we had all witnessed the demise of NeXT and many of us were anticipating the demise of Apple, and there was no particularly strong reason to believe that a union of the two would fare any better, let alone grow to become one of the A’s in FAANG.
I actually suspect that ObjC and the NeXT APIs played a big part in that success. I know they’ve fallen out of favor now, and for reasons I have to assume are good. But back in the early 2000s, the difference in how quickly I could develop a good GUI for OS X compared to what I was used to on Windows and GNOME was life changing. It attracted a bunch of developers to the platform, not just me, which spurred an accumulation of applications with noticeably better UX that, in turn, helped fuel Apple’s consumer sentiment revival.
Good take. Even back in the 1990s, OpenStep was thought to be the best way to develop a Windows app. But NeXT charged per-seat licenses, so it didn't get much use outside of Wall Street or other places where Jobs would personally show up. And of course something like iPhone is easier when they already had a UI framework and an IDE and etc.
Assuming you mean C (C++ is an 80s child), that’s trivially true because devices with an ObjC SDK are a strict subset of devices that are running on C.
Yes, that is why I don't find it "insane" like the grandparent does, like yeah, devices run old languages because those languages work well for their intended purpose.
You should feel that C’s longevity is insane. How many languages have come and gone in the meantime? C is truly an impressive language that profoundly moved humanity forward. If that’s not insane (used colloquially) to you, then what is?
Next was more or less an Apple spinoff, that was later acquired by Apple. Objective-C was created because using standards is contrary to the company culture. And with Swift they are painting themselves into a corner.
> Objective-C was created because using standards is contrary to the company culture
Objective-C was actually created by a company called Stepstone that wanted what they saw as the productivity benefits of Smalltalk (OOP) with the performance and portability of C. Originally, Objective-C was seen as a C "pre-compiler".
One of the companies that licensed Objective-C was NeXT. They also saw pervasive OOP as a more productive way to build GUI applications. That was the core value proposition of NeXT.
NeXT ended up basically taking over Objective-C and then it became of a core part of Apple when Apple bought NeXT to create the next-generation of macOS (the one we have now).
So, Objective-C was actually born attempting to "use standards" (C instead of Smalltalk) and really has nothing to do with Apple culture. Of course, Apple and NeXT were brought into the world by Steve Jobs
> Objective-C was created because using standards is contrary to the company culture.
What language would you have suggested for that mission and that era? Self or Smalltalk and give up on performance on 25-MHz-class processors? C or Pascal and give up an excellent object system with dynamic dispatch?
C's a great language in 1985, and a great starting point. But development of UI software is one of those areas where object oriented software really shines. What if we could get all the advantages of C as a procedural language, but graft on top an extremely lightweight object system with a spec of < 20 pages to take advantage of these new 1980s-era developments in software engineering, while keeping 100% of the maturity and performance of the C ecosystem? We could call it Objective-C.
Years ago I wrote a toy Lisp implementation in Objective-C, ignoring Apple’s standard library and implementing my own class hierarchy. At that point it was basically standard C plus Smalltalk object dispatch, and it was a very cool language for that type of project.
I haven’t used it in Apple’s ecosystem, so maybe I am way off base here. But it seems to me that it was Apple’s effort to evolve the language away from its systems roots into a more suitable applications language that caused all the ugliness.
Some refer to the “Tim Cook doctrine” as a reason for Swift’s existence. It’s not meant to be good, just to fulfill the purpose of controlling that part of their products, so they don’t have to rely on someone else’s tooling.
That doesn’t really make sense though. I thought that they hired Lattner to work on LLVM/clang so they could have a non-gpl compiler and to make whatever extensions they wanted to C/Obj-C. Remember when they added (essentially) closures to C to serve their internal purposes?
So they already got what they wanted without inventing a new language. There must be some other reason.
The Accidental Tech podcast had a long interview with Lattner about Swift in 2017 [0]. He makes it out as something that had started as side-project / exploration thing without much of an agenda, which grew mostly because of how good positive feedback the project had got from other developers. He had recently left Apple back then, and supposedly left the future of Swift in other peoples' hands.
I definitely agree with the first point - it's not meant to be the best.
On the second part, I think the big thing was that they needed something that would interop with Objective-C well and that's not something that any language was going to do if Apple didn't make it. Swift gave Apple something that software engineers would like a ton more than Objective-C.
I think it's also important to remember that in 2010/2014 (when swift started and when it was released), the ecosystem was a lot different. Oracle v Google was still going on and wasn't finished until 2021. So Java really wasn't on the table. Kotlin hit 1.0 in 2016 and really wasn't at a stage to be used when Apple was creating Swift. Rust was still undergoing massive changes.
And a big part of it was simply that they wanted something that would be an easy transition from Objective-C without requiring a lot of bridging or wrappers. Swift accomplished that, but it also meant that a lot of decisions around Swift were made to accommodate Apple, not things that might be generally useful to the lager community.
All languages have this to an extent. For example, Go uses a non-copying GC because Google wanted it to work with their existing C++ code more easily. Copying GCs are hard to get 100% correct when you're dealing with an outside runtime that doesn't expect things to be moved around in memory. This decision probably isn't what would be the best for most of the non-Google community, but it's also something that could be reconsidered in the future since it's an implementation detail rather than a language detail.
I'm not sure any non-Apple language would have bent over backwards to accommodate Objective-C. But also, what would Apple have chosen circa-2010 when work on Swift started? Go was (and to an extent still is) "we only do things these three Googlers think is a good idea", Go was basically brand-new at the time, and even today Go doesn't really have a UI framework. Kotlin hadn't been released when work started on Swift. C# was still closed source. Rust hadn't appeared yet and was still undergoing a lot of big changes through Swift's release. Python and other dynamic languages weren't going to fit the bill. There really wasn't anything that existed then which could have been used instead of Swift. Maybe D could have been used.
But also, is Swift bad? I think that some of the type inference stuff that makes compiles slow is genuinely a bad choice and I think the language could have used a little more editing, but it's pretty good. What's better that doesn't come with a garbage collector? I think Rust's borrow checker would have pissed off way too many people. I think Apple needed a language without a garbage collector for their desktop OS and it's also meant better battery life and lower RAM usage on mobile.
If you're looking for a language that doesn't have a garbage collector, what's better? Heck, what's even available? Zig is nice, but you're kinda doing manual memory management. I like Rust, but it's a much steeper learning curve than most languages. There's Nim, but its ARC-style system came 5+ years after Swift's introduction.
So even today and even without Objective-C, it's hard to see a language that would fit what Apple wants: a safe, non-GC language that doesn't require Rust-style stuff.
I think that their culture of trying to invent their own standards is generally bad, but it is even worse when it is a programming language. I believe they are painting themselves into a corner.
>For example, Go uses a non-copying GC because Google wanted it to work with their existing C++ code more easily. Copying GCs are hard to get 100% correct when you're dealing with an outside runtime that doesn't expect things to be moved around in memory.
Do you have a source for this?
C# has a copying GC, and easy interop with C has always been one of its strengths. From the perspective of the user, all you need to do is to "pin" a pointer to a GC-allocated object before you access it from C so that the collector avoids moving it.
I always thought it had more to do with making the implementation simpler during the early stages of development, with the possibility of making it a copying GC some time in the feature (mentioned somewhere in stdlib's sources I think) but it never came to fruition because Go's non-copying GC was fast enough and a lot of code has since been written with the assumption that memory never moves. Adding a copying GC today would probaby break a lot of existing code.
To add to this, whatever was to become Obj-C's successor needed to be just as or more well-suited for UI programming with AppKit/UIKit as Obj-C was. That alone narrows the list of candidates a lot.
Swift has it's problems, and I certainly wouldn't use it for anything outside of development for Apple platforms, but saying they had no experts on the team is a stretch. Most Swift leads were highly regarded members of the C++ world, even if you discount Chris Lattner.
I meant no Swift experts in the Ladybird team. Their expertise is C++, you may think the transition is easy, and it can be pretty painless at first, but true language expertise means knowing how to work around its flaws, and adapting your patterns to its strenghts. Cool for a hobby, but switching language in the middle of an herculean work is suicide.
> switching language in the middle of an herculean work is suicide
My read is that that this is the main thing that happened here.
The Ladybird team is quite pragmatic. Or, at least their founder is. I think they understood the scale of buidling a browser. They understood that it was a massive undertaking. They also understood the security challenge of building an application so big that processes untrusted input as its main job. So, they thought that perhaps they needed a better language than C++ for these reasons. They evaluated a few options and came away thinking that Swift was the best, so they announced that they expected to move towards Swift in the future.
But the other side of being pragamatic is that, as time passed, they also realized how hard it would be to chagne horses. And they are quite productivity driven. They produce a YouTube video every month detailing their progress including charts and numbers.
Making no progress on the "real" job of building a browser to make progress on the somewhat artificial job of moving to a new programming language just never made sense I guess.
And the final part of being pragmatic is that, after months of not really making any progress on the switch, the founder posted this patch essentially admitting the reality and suggesting they just formalize the lack of progress and move on.
The lack of progress on Swift that is. Their progress on making a browser has been absolutely mind-blowing. This comment is being written in Ladybird.
The point of Swift is not really the language, it's the standard ABI for dynamic code. The Rust folks should commit to supporting it as a kind of extern FFI/interop alongside C, at least on platforms where a standard Swift implementation exists.
It depends. Many languages are a poor fit for certain use cases, and some are bad at everything beyond a very specific niche. Some are rather unpleasant to write any kind of substantial UI with.
Of course, writing a bootloader in Matlab or a MMORPG in Visual Basic would be masochistic. But these days people are writing CLI tools and TUI in Typescript...
Rust bros already on their way to vibecode a rustbrowser, get their rust stars on rusthub, insult anyone to point out it doesn’t work, and call it a rustday.
There's already a stereotype that Rust people will just carpet bomb any discussion with aggressively promoting Rust, people expect it to happen at this point and it just annoys people.
So I think it probably meets the threshold of "toxic", but more importantly - it's not effective. Everyone and their dog has already heard of Rust, aggressive proselytising is not going to help drive Rust adoption, it's just pissing people off
I think that's more of a financial grift in a lot of cases (how many pie-eyed AI evangelists turn out to be running some "AI startup" or otherwise have skin in the game).
The rust thing is more like actual religious evangelism, like having Jehovah's Witnesses knocking on the door. They have seen the light and you haven't
I think they are mostly just idealists. Found a perfect programming language that allows them to claim that everything else is wrong, and rust can solve every problem under the sun.
This reads like an AI response to me. Would you elaborate? I can see no reason to believe it would achieve stability based on many of the statements in this issue.
Chiming in: indeed, the response is very dry, and raises suspicion. It states the obvious facts and then makes a boring statement, lacking any nuance of the conversation. It is not argumentative in the very least.
Time has been spend, yes. But the topic at hand is after so much time the conclusion to abandon this path is justified.
There's no way to say this without sounding mean: Everything Chris Lattner has done has been a "successful mess". He's obviously smart, but a horrible engineer. No one should allow him to design anything.
LLVM: Pretty much everyone who has created a programming language with it has complained about its design. gingerbill, Jon Blow, and Andrew Kelley have all complained about it. LLVM is a good idea, but it that idea was executed better by Ken Thompson with his C compiler for Plan 9, and then again with his Go compiler design. Ken decided to create his own "architecture agnostic" assembly, which is very similar to the IR idea with LLVM.
Swift: I was very excited with the first release of Swift. But it ultimately did not have a very focused vision outlined for it. Because of this, it has morphed into a mess. It tries to be everything for everyone, like C++, and winds up being mediocre, and slow to compile to top it off.
Mojo isn't doesn't exist for the public yet. I hope it turns out to be awesome, but I'm just not going to get my hopes up this time.
Yes. I also written a compiler and I also complained about LLVM.
LLVM is
- Slow to compile
- Breaks compilers/doesn't have a stable ABI
- Optimizes poorly (at least, worse than GCC)
Swift I never used but I tried compiling it once and it was the bottom 2 slowest compiler I ever tested. The only thing nearly as bad was kotlin but 1) I don't actually remember which of these are worse 2) Kotlin wasn't meant to be a CLI compiler, it was meant to compile in the background as a language server so it was designed around that
Mojo... I have things I could say... But I'll stick to this. I talked to engineers there and I asked one how they expected any python developers to use the planned borrow checker. The engineer said "Don't worry about it" ie they didn't have a plan. The nicest thing I can say is they didn't bullshit me 100% of the time when I directly asked a question privately. That's the only nice or neutral thing I could say
> LLVM: Pretty much everyone who has created a programming language with it has complained about its design. gingerbill, Jon Blow, and Andrew Kelley have all complained about it. LLVM is a good idea, but it that idea was executed better by Ken Thompson with his C compiler for Plan 9, and then again with his Go compiler design. Ken decided to create his own "architecture agnostic" assembly, which is very similar to the IR idea with LLVM.
I suggest you ask around to see what the consensus is for which compiler is actually mature. Hint: for all its warts, nobody is writing a seriously optimized language in any of the options you listed besides LLVM.
As far as I know, only Go uses Go's back end because it was specifically designed for Go. But the architecture is such that it makes it trivial for Go to cross compile for any OS and architecture. This is something that LLVM cannot do. You have to compile a new compiler for every OS and arch combo you wish to compile to.
You could imagine creating a modified Go assembler that is more generic and not tied to Go's ABI that could accomplish the same effect as LLVM. However, it'd probably be better to create a project like that from scratch, because most of Go's optimizations happen before reaching the assembler stage.
It would probably be best to have the intermediate language that QBE has and transform that into "intermediate assembly" (IA) very similar to Go's assembly. That way the IL stage could contain nearly all the optimization passes, and the IA stage would focus on code generation that would translate to any OS/arch combo.
> As far as I know, only Go uses Go's back end because it was specifically designed for Go. But the architecture is such that it makes it trivial for Go to cross compile for any OS and architecture. This is something that LLVM cannot do. You have to compile a new compiler for every OS and arch combo you wish to compile to.
I don't think that's true. Zig have a cross-compiler (that also compiles C and C++) based on LLVM. I believe LLVM (unlike gcc) is inherently a cross-compiler, and it's mostly just shipping header files for every platform that `zig cc` is adding.
I do not have enough knowledge to say anything bad about LLVM. As an "amateur" compiler writer, it did confuse me a bit though.
What I will say is that it seem popular to start with LLVM and then move away from it. Zig is doign that. Rust is heading in the direction perhaps with Cranelift. It feels that, if LLVM had completely nailed its mission, these kinds of projects would be less common.
It is also notable that the Dragonegg project to bring GCC languages to LLVM died but we have multiple projects porting Rust to GCC.
Chris Lattner is definitely a genius engineer at innovation, implementation and delivery but long-term, robust, maintenable software-design doesn't appear to be in his capability set.
The latter is definitely a defining capability of Anders Hejlsberg. (C#/Typescript designer)
> Everything Chris Lattner has done has been a "successful mess".
I don't have an emotional reaction to this, i.e. I don't think you're being mean, but it is wrong and reductive, which people usually will concisely, and perhaps reductively, describe as "mean".
Why is it wrong?
LLVM is great.
Chris Lattner left Apple a *decade* ago, & thus has ~0 impact or responsibility on Swift interop with C++ today.
Swift is a fun language to write, hence, why they shoehorned it in, in the first place.
Mojo is fine, but I wouldn't really know how you or I would judge it. For me, I'm not super-opinionated on Python, and it doesn't diverge heavily from it afaik.
I was hired around Google around the same time, but not nearly as famous :)
AFAICouldT it was a "hire first, figure out what to do later", and it ended up being Swift for TensorFlow. That went ~nowhere, and he left within 2 years.
That's fine and doesn't reflect on him, in general, that's Google for ya. At least that era of Google.
You don't explain or support your position, you are calling Lattner names. That's not helpful to me or anyone else if we are trying to evaluate his work. Swift has millions of users as does Mojo and Modular in general. These are not trivial accomplishments.
Sick burn my man. Hope you check out Mojo lang vs arguing about rounding errors. I’m still unclear why I’m supposed to steer clear of Lattner which was what we were discussing.
Not sure what you're even talking about. You said something I was curious about since I thought you knew something about it I didn't but then you told me to look it up myself, for some reason, and I did. I don't know how you construed that as a "sick burn" or that you're "supposed to steer clear of Lattner," both of which I never said or implied.
It is all not important and I'm moving on as I'm sure you are as well. I assume good faith so I'm thinking we talked past each other a bit plus I was grouchy at one point (I apologize).
Here's the nut from the relevant comment: "There's no way to say this without sounding mean: Everything Chris Lattner has done has been a "successful mess". He's obviously smart, but a horrible engineer. No one should allow him to design anything."
I can't support a take like this (the commenter's, not yours) it is not helpful or informative. That original comment was edited too, or added onto. On the face of it, the sentiment that Swift and Mojo and LLVM are these awful abominations is beyond the pale for me from an engineering standpoint. I think there are some FOSS feelings in play that stir up strongly held ideologies.
Except performance isn't great and it covers far fewer platforms. It aims for 70% performance but the few benchmarks I've seen show more like 30-50% performance.
It's a cool project and I'd consider it for a toy language but it's far from an LLVM replacement.
I don't know what point you're trying to make but your question was what's an alternative to llvm. People writing compilers always used C89 or a version of it (C11 allows an easier atomic implementation). There's a lot more C89 compilers than backends that llvm supports. When I was writing arduino code clang/llvm couldn't generate the AVR code for the board. The default toolchain was gcc with an AVR backend. IIRC it had optimizations and was the only reasonable compiler I could use. There's nothing wrong using C as your backend
I didn't say there was. Saying use C instead of LLVM is fine for a language designer.
But that doesn't make it a replacement for LLVM as a piece of infrastructure. C compilers still need an optimizing backend like LLVM.
The conversation is about whether or not LLVM is a shit piece of engineering, not whether you should target C or IR as a language designer. Avoiding using LLVM directly isn't a replacement lol.
You could say "GCC" is a replacement which at least isn't completely false, but GCC's backend is far more annoying to use for different languages.
You don't really need to deal with gcc backend. Most languages are expressible in C89. It'll obviously be less readable since generated lines look nothing like source lines but C89 beats llvm in most cases, especially if the C compiler supports assembly. I stuck to using intrinsics only because I heard of compilers producing worse code when it hits asm blocks since it can't understand it as well as intrinsics. I took out llvm last time it broke my compiler because it didn't add any value
IIRC, the Inmos Transputer shipped without a C compiler, and while third party products (including a port of GCC) did come later, it was Occam-only for quite some time.
What projects are trying something similar to Ladybird? Well, mobody really. But Servo is pretty close though they are not writing their own Javascript engine or anything.
But you should perhaps give your attention to Servo. They were founded as a project to write a modern browser in Rust. So, no hand-waving there.
No hand-waving on the Ladybird team either in my opinion. They have very strong technical leadership. The idea that building a massive application designed to process untrusted user input at scale might need a better language than C++ seems like a pretty solid technical suggestion. Making incedible progress month after month using the language you started with seems pretty good too. And deciding, given the progress buidling and the lack of progress exploring the new language, that perhaps it would be best to formally abandon the idea of a language switch...well, that seems like a pretty solid decision as well.
At least, that is my view.
Oh, and I was a massive Servo fan before the Ladybird project even began. But, given how much further Ladybird has gotten than Servo has, despite being at it for less time and taking on a larger scope...well, I am giving my attention to Ladybird these days.
The commit removing Swift has a little bit more detail:
https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird/commit/e87f889e3...Some more context here too:
https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird/issues/933
As someone who first began using Swift in 2021, after almost 10 years in C#/.NET land, I was already a bit grumpy at how complex C# was, (C# was 21 years at that point), but then coming to Swift, I couldn't believe how complex Swift was compared to C# - Swift was released in 2014, so would've been 8 years old in 2022. How is a language less than half the age of C# MORE complex than C#?
And this was me trying to use Swift for a data access layer + backend web API. There's barely any guidance or existing knowledge on using Swift for backend APIs, let alone a web browser of all projects.
There's no precedent or existing implementation you can look at for reference; known best practices in Swift are geared almost entirely towards using it with Apple platform APIs, so tons of knowledge about using the language itself simply cannot be applied outside the domain of building client-running apps for Apple hardware.
To use swift outside its usual domain is to become a pioneer, and try something truly untested. It was always a longshot.
I started using it around 2018. After being reasonably conversant in Objective-C, I fully adopted Swift for a new iOS app and thought it was a big improvement.
But there's a lot of hokey, amateurish stuff in there... with more added all the time. Let's start with the arbitrary "structs are passed by value, classes by reference." And along with that: "Prefer structs over classes."
But then: "Have one source of truth." Um... you can't do that when every data structure is COPIED on every function call. So now what? I spent so much time dicking around trying to conform to Swift's contradictory "best practices" that developing became a joyless trudge with glacial progress. I finally realized that a lot of the sources I was reading didn't know WTF they were talking about and shitcanned their edicts.
A lot of the crap in Swift and SwiftUI remind me of object orientation, and how experienced programmers arrived at a distilled version of it that kept the useful parts and rejected dumb or utterly impractical ideas that were preached in the early days.
I think Swift was developed to keep a number of constituencies happy.
You can do classic OOP, FP, Protocol-Oriented Programming, etc., or mix them all (like I do).
A lot of purists get salty that it doesn’t force implementation of their choice, but I’m actually fine with it. I tend to have a “chimeric” approach, so it suits me.
Been using it since 2014 (the day it was announced). I enjoy it.
No Swift was developed as a strategic moat around Apple's devices. They cannot be dependent on any other party for the main language that runs on their hardware. Controlling your own destiny full stack means having your own language.
Apple already had that "strategic moat" with Objective-C. It was already a language you could effectively only use on Apple platforms (the runtime and the standard library only run on Darwin) and for which Apple controlled the compiler (they have their own fork of Clang).
I suspect that it was developed, in order to make native development more accessible. SwiftUI is also doing that.
They want native, partly as a “moat,” but also as a driver for hardware and services sales. They don’t want folks shrugging and saying “It doesn’t matter what you buy; they’re all the same.”
I hear exactly that, with regard to many hybrid apps.
Prefer structs over classes != only use structs.
There are plenty of valid reasons to use classes in Swift. For example if you want to have shared state you will need to use a class so that each client has the same reference instead of a copy.
Yes, that's what I said.
> But there's a lot of hokey, amateurish stuff in there... with more added all the time. Let's start with the arbitrary "structs are passed by value, classes by reference." And along with that: "Prefer structs over classes."
This is the same way that C# works and C and C++ why is this a surprise?
Neither C++ nor C pass classes by reference by default (what even is a C "class" other than a struct?).
You are correct - it’s been ages since I’ve done C. The distinction is in C#.
> when every data structure is COPIED on every function call
Swift structs use copy on write, so they aren’t actually copied on every function call.
They are, as far as "Have one source of truth" is concerned. That is what parent is talking about.
They don’t, by default. That’s something you have to implement yourself.
It’s a common misconception that comes from the standard library data structures, which almost all do implement CoW
Nowhere does it say structs provide “one source of truth”. It says the opposite actually- that classes are to be used when unique instances are required. All classes have a unique ID, which is simply it’s virtual memory address. Structs by contrast get memcpy’d left and right and have no uniqueness.
You can also look at the source code for the language if any it’s confusing. It’s very readable.
You're re-stating his exact problem while trying to refute him.
No, I’m not. OP is conflating multiple guidelines for different purposes and attempting to use them all simultaneously.
> OP is ... attempting to use [multiple guidelines] simultaneously.
No, he's literally explaining why the guidelines can't be used simultaneously.
They aren't supposed to be used simultaneously, which is literally what my comment was explaining. Different guidelines to solve different problems.
Have one source of truth is a universal guideline.
Prefer structs over classes is a universal, if weak, guideline.
It's funny how people can be all hung up on composability of things like type systems, and then completely blow off the desire for composability of guidelines.
In the last years, simplistic languages such as Python and Go have “made the case” that complexity is bad, period. But when humans communicate expertly in English (Shakespeare, JK Rowling, etc) they use its vast wealth of nuance, shading and subtlety to create a better product. Sure you have to learn all the corners to have full command of the language, to wield all that expressive power (and newcomers to English are limited to the shallow end of the pool). But writing and reading are asymmetrical and a more expressive language used well can expose the code patterns and algorithms in a way that is easier for multiple maintainers to read and comprehend. We need to match the impedance of the tool to the problem. [I paraphrase Larry Wall, inventor of the gloriously expressive https://raku.org]
Not sure how I feel about Shakespeare and JK Rowling living in the same parenthesis!
Computer languages are the opposite of natural languages - they are for formalising and limiting thought, the exact opposite of literature. These two things are not comparable.
If natural language was so good for programs, we’d be using it - many many people have tried from literate programming onward.
Natural languages are ambiguous, and that's a feature. Computer languages must be unambiguous.
I don't see a case for "complex" vs "simple" in the comparison with natural languages.
I fully accept that formalism is an important factor in programming language design. But all HLLs (well, even ASM) are a compromise between machine speak (https://youtu.be/CTjolEUj00g?si=79zMVRl0oMQo4Tby) and human speak. My case is that the current fashion is to draw the line at an overly simple level, and that there are ways to wrap the formalism in more natural constructs that trigger the parts of the brain that have evolved to hanle language (nouns, verbs, adverbs, prepositions and so on).
Here's a very simple, lexical declaration made more human friendly by use of the preposition `my` (or `our` if it is packaged scoped)...
How is that snippet any better than:
x := 42
Or
let x = 42
Or
x = 42
It seems like a regression from modern languages.
"my" is 33% shorter than "let"
Example 1 and 3 are not declarations, so apples ↔ oranges
Example 1 is a declaration in Go. Example 3 is a declaration in Python.
my $x = 42;
let x = 42
Well, when you add in the '$' and ';' tokens the "let" example is still shorter. Also as another person replied to you, those other two examples are declarations in other languages. So 0 for 3 there.
Have you looked at all the previous attempts?
Your example is not compelling I’m afraid but you should try building a language to see. Also read literate programming if you haven’t already.
Literate programming is not about programming in natural languages: it's about integrating code (i.e. the formal description in some DSL) with the meta-code such as comments, background information, specs, tests, etc.
BTW, one side benefit of LP is freedom from arbitrary structure of DSLs. A standard practice in LP is to declare and define objects in the spot in which they are being used; LP tools will parse them out and distribute to the syntactically correct places.
Well I think the ambition was to have as much as possible in natural language, with macros calling out to ‘hidden’ code intended for machines. So I do think there is a good link with later attempts to write using natural language and make computer languages more human-friendly and he was one of the first to have this idea.
Neither strategy has had much success IMO.
Exactly. I mean think about the programming languages used in aircraft and such. There's reasons. It all depends on what people are willing to tolerate.
>But writing and reading are asymmetrical and a more expressive language used well can expose the code patterns and algorithms in a way that is easier for multiple maintainers to read and comprehend.
It's exactly the opposite. Writing and reading are asymmetrical, and that's why it's important to write code that is as simple as possible.
It's easy to introduce a lot of complexity and clever hacks, because as the author you understand it. But good code is readable for people, and that's why very expressive languages like perl are abhorred.
> Writing and reading are asymmetrical, and that's why it's important to write code that is as simple as possible.
I 100% agree with your statement. My case is that a simple language does not necessarily result in simpler and more readable code. You need a language that fits the problem domain and that does not require a lot of boilerplate to handle more complex structures. If you are shoehorning a problem into an overly simplistic language, then you are fighting your tool. OO for OO. FP for FP. and so on.
I fear that the current fashion to very simple languages is a result of confusing these aspects and by way of enforcing certain corporate behaviours on coders. Perhaps that has its place eg Go in Google - but the presumption that one size fits all is quite a big limitation for many areas.
The corollary of this is that richness places an burden of responsibility on the coder not to write code golf. By tbh you can write bad code in any language if you put your mind to it.
Perhaps many find richness and expressivity abhorrent - but to those of us who like Larry's thinking it is a really nice, addictive feeling when the compiler gets out of the way. Don't knock it until you give it a fair try!
Then you should write assembly only. Like `MOV`, `ADD`... can't really get simpler than that.
Problem is, that makes every small part of the program simple, but it increases the number of parts (and/or their interaction). And ultimately, if you need to understand the whole thing it's suddenly much harder.
Surely you can write the same behaviour in "clever" (when did that become a negative attribute?) or "good" way in assembly. You are correct. But that's a different matter.
Perlis's 10th epigram feels germane:
> Get into a rut early: Do the same process the same way. Accumulate idioms. Standardize. The only difference(!) between Shakespeare and you was the size of his idiom list - not the size of his vocabulary.
Well sure - being in a rut is good. But the language is the medium in which you cast your idiom, right?
Here's a Python rut:
Here's that rut in Raku: I am claiming that this is a nicer rut.If it's so fantastic, then why on earth do you go out of your way to add extra lines and complexity to the Python?
Complexity-wise, this version is more complicated (mixing different styles and paradigms) and it's barely less tokens. Lines of code don't matter anyway, cognitive load does.
Even though I barely know Raku (but I do have experience with FP), it took way less time to intuitively grasp what the Raku was doing, vs. both the Python versions. If you're only used to imperative code, then yeah, maybe the Python looks more familiar, though then... how about riding some new bicycles for the mind.
> Complexity-wise, this version is more complicated (mixing different styles and paradigms)
Really? In the other Python version the author went out of his way to keep two variables, and shit out intermediate results as you went. The raku version generates a sequence that doesn't even actually get output if you're executing inside a program, but that can be used later as a sequence, if you bind it to something.
I kept my version to the same behavior as that Python version, but that's different than the raku version, and not in a good way.
You should actually ignore the print in the python, since the raku wasn't doing it anyway. So how is "create a sequence, then while it is not as long as you like, append the sum of the last two elements" a terrible mix of styles and paradigms, anyway? Where do you get off writing that?
> Lines of code don't matter anyway, cognitive load does.
I agree, and the raku line of code imposes a fairly large cognitive load.
If you prefer "for" to "while" for whatever reason, here's a similar Python to the raku.
The differences are that it's a named sequence, and it doesn't go on forever and then take a slice. No asterisks that don't mean multiply, no carets that don't mean bitwise exclusive or.> If you're only used to imperative code, then yeah, maybe the Python looks more familiar, though then... how about riding some new bicycles for the mind.
It's not (in my case, anyway) actually about imperative vs functional. It's about twisty stupid special symbol meanings.
Raku is perl 6 and it shows. Some people like it and that's fine. Some people don't and that's fine, too. What's not fine is to make up bogus comparisons and bogus implications about the people who don't like it.
Reminds me a bit of the fish anecdote told by DFW... they've only swam in water their entire life, so they don't even understand what water is.
Here are the mixed paradigms/styles in these Python snippets:
- Statements vs. expressions
- Eager list comprehensions vs. lazy generator expressions
- Mutable vs. immutable data structures / imperative reference vs. functional semantics
(note that the Raku version only picks _one_ side of those)
> seq.extend(sum(seq[-2:]) for _ in range(18))
I mean, this is the worst Python code yet. To explain what this does to a beginner, or even intermediate programmer.... oooooh boy.
You have the hidden inner iteration loop inside the `.extend` standard library method driving the lazy generator expression with _unspecified_ one-step-at-a-time semantics, which causes `seq[-2:]` to be evaluated at exactly the right time, and then `seq` is extended even _before_ the `.extend` finishes (which is very surprising!), causing the next generator iteration to read a _partially_ updated `seq`...
This is almost all the footguns of standard imperative programming condensed into a single expression. Like ~half of the "programming"-type bugs I see in code reviews are related to tricky temporal (execution order) logic, combined with mutability, that depend on unclearly specified semantics.
> It's about twisty stupid special symbol meanings.
Some people program in APL/J/K/Q just fine, and they prefer their symbols. Calling it "stupid" is showing your prejudice. (I don't and can't write APL but still respect it)
> What's not fine is to make up bogus comparisons and bogus implications about the people who don't like it.
That's a quite irrational take. I didn't make any bogus comparisons. I justified or can justify all my points. I did not imply anything about people who don't like Raku. I don't even use Raku myself...
> You have the hidden inner iteration loop inside the `.extend` standard library method driving the lazy generator expression with _unspecified_ one-step-at-a-time semantics
That's why it wasn't the first thing I wrote.
> To explain what this does to a beginner, or even intermediate programmer.... oooooh boy.
As if the raku were better in that respect, lol.
> Some people program in APL/J/K/Q just fine, and they prefer their symbols.
APL originally had a lot of its own symbols with very little reuse, and clear rules. Learning the symbols was one thing, but the usage rules were minimal and simple. I'm not a major fan of too many different symbols, but I really hate reuse in any context where how things will be parsed is unclear. In the raku example, what if the elements were to be multiplied?
> Calling it "stupid" is showing your prejudice. (I don't and can't write APL but still respect it) > Reminds me a bit of the fish anecdote told by DFW...
Yeah, for some reason, it's not OK for me to insult a language, but it's OK for you to insult a person.
But you apparently missed that the "twisty" part was about the multiple meanings. Because both those symbols are used in Python (the * in multiple contexts even) but the rules on parsing them are very simple.
perl and its successor raku are not about simple parsing. You are right to worry about the semantics of execution, but that starts with the semantics of how the language is parsed.
In any case, sure, if you want to be anal about paradigm purity, take my first example, and (1) ignore the print statement because the raku version wasn't doing that anyway, although the OP's python version was, and (2) change the accumulation.
But that won't get you very far in a shop that cares about pythonicity and coding standards.And...
You can claim all you want that the original was "pure" but that's literally because it did nothing. Not only did it have no side effects, but, unless it was assigned or had something else done with it, the result was null and void.
Purity only gets you so far.
You're getting more and more irrational.
> it's OK for you to insult a person.
I made an analogy which just means that it's hard to understand what the different styles and paradigms are when those are the things you constantly use.
You're apparently taking that as an insult...
> But you apparently missed that the "twisty" part
I didn't miss anything. You just didn't explain it. "twisty" does not mean "ambiguous" or "hard to parse". Can't miss what you don't write.
> In the raku example, what if the elements were to be multiplied?
$ raku -e 'say (0, 1, 2, * × * ... )[^10]' # for readability (0 1 2 2 4 8 32 256 8192 2097152)
$ raku -e 'say (0, 1, 2, * * ... *)[^10]' # for typeability (0 1 2 2 4 8 32 256 8192 2097152)
Yeah, no thanks.
My instincts about raku were always that perl was too fiddly, so why would I want perl 6, and this isn't doing anything to dissuade me from that position.
err - I cut and pasted the Python directly from ChatGPT ;-)
But it doesn't do the same thing at all as the raku.
It doesn't build a list, rather it dumps it as it goes.
It has an explicit print.
It uses a named constant for 20 rather than a literal.
etc, etc...
Not to mention how heated my laptop gets when I try to compile a new vapor template. On an m1.
same. i thought it would have been as quick to pick up as rust. nowhere near. i spent weeks trying to go through every feature of the language at least once. time in which i could’ve read several rust books and already start hacking up some interesting projects. so much in swift is pointless syntax sugar. why do i need 50 ways to do exactly the same thing, it’s just nonsense. then i have to look up the language reference whenever i read a new codebase
So did you go back to and keep using C#/NET?
well for backend development, yes - I technically never stopped as I had existing projects to maintain. But after trying out Swift a couple times, I've dropped it entirely for backend. For new backend work it's C#/.NET all the way.
I wanted to try using a native language other than C++ and Swift ostensibly seemed easier to pick up. I continue to use Swift for iOS app development though where it is much easier to use; but that has its own share of compromises and trade-offs - but not centred around Swift, around SwiftUI vs UIKit.
Regardless of the language it is written in, one thing that I hope Ladybird will focus on when the time comes is a user-respecting Javascript implementation. Regardless of what the Web standards say, it is unacceptable that websites can (ab)use JS against the users for things such as monitoring presence/activity, disabling paste, and extracting device information beyond what is strictly necessary for an acceptably formatted website. One approach could be to report standardized (spoofed) values across the user base so that Ladybird users are essentially indistinguishable from each other (beyond the originating IP). This is more or less the approach taken by Tor, and where a project like Ladybird could make a real difference.
There's just too many defense mechanisms on popular websites that would simply make Ladybird flagged as a bot and render the website unusable. I wouldn't mind a toggle to switch between this and normal behavior but having that as a default would be bad for wider adoption.
If those "popular websites" are the likes of Facebook and Instagram, I don't see that as a big loss. That being said, I find that most of the Web works just fine on Tor, so it's certainly possible. Most of the issues seem related to the (known) the exit IP being overused or identified as Tor.
> If those "popular websites" are the likes of Facebook and Instagram, I don't see that as a big loss.
Personally I wouldn't mind either but my point is that they probably want to cater to the average person, and not just security conscious tech savvy people, and if that's the case, then you really can't exclude FB/IG/YT and others from working properly in your browser.
> they probably want to cater to the average person, and not just security conscious tech savvy people
Why? The average person is well served by large existing players, whereas security conscious tech people are extremely underserved and often actually willing to pay.
Specific numbers aside, one possible reason is they want to increase adoption to gain user volume, in order to have an effect on the larger ecosystem.
Once you have non-trivial network effects, you could continue to influence the ecosystem (see: MSIE, Firefox in its early days, and Google Chrome). There are probably multiple paths to this. This is one.
Influence isn’t all about the raw numbers - if yours is the browser of choice for developers, that’s going to give you a stronger voice than just being the fourth best browser. Think about Twitter - by all accounts, Twitter’s user numbers were dwarfed by the other networks, but they punched way above their weight because the entire political policy making and reporting apparatus was on there.
Firefox tries to position itself as that secure and private alternative, but this is mostly marketing. For a long time, Chromium had better site isolation, and the default Firefox settings are permissive when it comes to fingerprinting. Out of the box, it seems that Brave wins here, but for now using Brave means accepting a lot of extra commercial stuff that should not be in a browser in the first place (and that increases the attack surface). I have been using the Arkenfox user.js for Firefox, but it's unclear how much good it does or if it isn't counterproductive (by making the the user stand out).
Most of the web works with Tor, but to make tor successful at the things it is intended to do you have to disable JavaScript.
This kills the internet.
Only if there is not widespread adoption.
A web browser that explicitly does its own thing regardless of web standards is the last browser in the world I would consider using.
That's interesting, what happened? They don't explain it there.
For the record, I don't have a dog in this fight. As long as it runs on Linux, I'm willing to test drive it when it's ready.
It looked to me like it was just due to recurring build issues. Lots of "swift can't import these conflicting C++ versioned libraries concurrently" and "can't use some operator due to versioning or build conflicts". Basically it sounds like trying to add swift to the project was breaking too many things, and they decided it wasn't worth it.
It's a shame, I think swift is an underappreciated language, however I understand their reasoning. I think if they tried to just use swift from the beginning it would have been too ambitious, and trying to add swift to a fragile, massive project was probably too complex.
Looking at their integration, with cmake, they definitely took the hardmode approach to adoption.
The list of issues does not seem to stem from whether they had used this build tool (CMake) nor others (nor official build environments).
Why did Ladybird even attempt this with Swift, but (I presume) not with Rust? If they're going to go to the trouble of adding another language, does Rust not have a better history of C++ interop? Not to mention, Swift's GC doesn't seem great for the browser's performance.
https://x.com/awesomekling/status/1822236888188498031 https://x.com/awesomekling/status/1822239138038382684 "In the end it came down to Swift vs Rust, and Swift is strictly better in OO support and C++ interop."
Did they consider using Nim? It has great C++ interop, OO and same ARC memory management as in Swift.
> In the end it came down to Swift vs Rust, and Swift is strictly better in OO support and C++ interop
Why not D?
Why not rust? It's popilar, in wide adoption, with wide support, without the baggage of C++. What'e the downside?
Well they already chose Swift over Rust because they said:
> Swift is strictly better in OO support and C++ interop
So I guess from their point of view that’s why not rust.
I don’t have a horse in the race.
I was genuinely interested in why they didn’t even consider D given they already ruled out rust for those particular reasons, for which it seems D would fulfill nicely.
It is not backward compatible, the library system is immature, and there is no variety of different compilers for the language.
> the library system is immature
Hoo boy, wait until you hear about the state of C++'s library "system"
> Swift is strictly better in OO support and C++ interop
Fascinating.
They've shown the idea it is better on C++ interop is wrong.
I don't know enough to say Rust has same OO support as Swift, but I'm pretty sure it does. (my guess as a former Swift dev: "protocol oriented programming" was a buzzy thing that would have sounded novel, but amounted to "use traits" in rust parlance)
EDIT: Happy to hear a reply re: why downvotes, -3 is a little wild, given current replies don't raise any issues.
Rust has straightforward support for every part of OOP other than implementation inheritance, and even implementation inheritance can be rephrased elegantly as the generic typestate pattern. (The two are effectively one and the same; if anything, generic typestate is likely more general.)
> Rust has straightforward support for every part of OOP other than implementation inheritance
Except the only thing that makes OOP OOP: Message passing.
Granted, Swift only just barely supports it, and only for the sake of interop with Objective-C. Still, Swift has better OO support because of it. Rust doesn't even try.
Not that OOP is much of a goal. There is likely good reason why Smalltalk, Objective-C, and Ruby are really the only OOP languages in existence (some esoteric language nobody has ever heard of notwithstanding).
I’m pretty sure when the Ladybird team said “Swift has strictly better OOP support”, they were not referring to ObjC style message passing, so it’s not even relevant.
I'm pretty sure your guessing is silly. I assume you are trying to be here in good faith, so make your case. Since it is not support for message passing, what else makes Swift have "strictly better OOP support"?
That's the thing man, there isn't anything. It was an odd thing in the tweet to say that it has better OOP.
(source: iOS dev from jailbreak days, so like 8 years before Swift, till 2019. He did not mean dynamic dispatch and Swift has dynamic dispatch by way of "you can annotate a Swift method with @objc and we'll emit it as an ObjC method instead of Swift", not Smalltalk-ish, like, at all. if you're the poster who originally said "because of dynamic dispatch", I understand why you're frustrated but I have 0 idea why you think dynamic dispatch in Swift would matter, much less say it makes Swift much better at OOP than Rust. It's impolite to say "utterly baffling engineering decision" in public, so there's subtext in the conversation. Namely that both claims made 0 sense if you had practical familiarity with either)
> That's the thing man, there isn't anything.
But that's the thing, there is: It supports message passing.
Like we already discussed long ago, it supports it poorly, and only for the sake of compatibility with Objective-C, but still that makes its OOP support better than Rust's. Rust has no OOP support at all. It is not an OOP language and never would want to be. OOP goes completely against its core principles (statically-typed, performance-minded).
Realistically, nobody would consider Swift an OOP language either. However, on the spectrum, it is unquestionably closer to being an OOP language. It at least gets an honourable mention in the short list of OOP languages. It is undeniable that Swift has "better" OOP support; not to be confused with good OOP support.
> He did not mean dynamic dispatch
Of course not. Dynamic dispatch is for function calling. OOP doesn't use dynamic dispatch. That's literally why we call it object-oriented rather than function-oriented (or functional, as the kids say). This is also why Objective-C, quite brilliantly, uses [foo bar] syntax (hint: it kind of looks like an ASCII-art envelope for a reason): To make it clear that conceptually you are not calling a function.
> I understand why you're frustrated
I don't. Fill us in.
Ok, I've now read through the rest of this thread and I think I understand where you're coming from, but I also think you're making my point for me.
You're using a definition of OOP where only Smalltalk-style message passing counts. By that definition, you're right: Swift is closer, because `@objc` exists. But by that definition, neither Swift nor Rust is an OOP language in any meaningful sense, and the delta between them is mass-of-the-electron tiny. Swift's message passing support is an annotation that is a compatibility shim for a 40-year-old runtime, not a design philosophy.
So when you say Swift has "better OO support"... sure, in the same way that my car has better submarine support than yours because I left the windows cracked and water could theoretically get in. Technically true! Not useful!
The Ladybird team are C++ developers evaluating languages for a browser engine. When C++ developers say "OOP" they mean classes, inheritance hierarchies, virtual methods. The DOM is a giant inheritance tree. That's the context. You can tell them they're using the word wrong, but that doesn't change what they meant, and what they meant is the only thing that matters for understanding whether the claim made sense.
And under their definition-which is also the definition used by mass, essentially every working programmer and every university curriculum for the last 30 years-Swift and Rust are actually pretty close, which was my original point. Swift has `class` with inheritance, Rust has traits and composition. Neither is Smalltalk. The claim that Swift is "strictly better" was weird no matter which definition you pick.
(Also, and I say this respectfully: characterizing C++/Java/Rust as "functional programming" because they encapsulate data with functions is... a take. I get the logic chain you're following but that is not a definition that will help anyone communicate with anyone else, which is presumably the point of definitions.)
> When C++ developers say "OOP" they mean classes, inheritance hierarchies, virtual methods.
Okay, but for that to be true in this case then you must explain how Swift has "better OOP support". If there is no rational explanation for now Swift has "better OOP support" by the metrics you are imagining, as you, me, and everyone else has alluded to earlier, then clearly that isn't what they meant.
> I get the logic chain you're following but that is not a definition that will help anyone communicate with anyone else
Won't help communicate with anyone else meaning that you are the only one capable of understanding the logic chain? I'm sure you are a talented guy, but the world isn't exactly lacking in talented people. I'm sorry to say, but most everyone on HN will have absolutely no trouble understanding this.
> Okay, but for that to be true in this case then you must explain how Swift has "better OOP support" by that token.
I did. Swift has `class` types with implementation inheritance. Rust does not. If you're porting a C++ codebase with deep class hierarchies (like, say, a browser DOM), Swift lets you transliterate those hierarchies directly. Rust makes you rethink them into composition and traits. That's a real difference that matters to a team mid-migration, and it's an extremely rational explanation for why a C++ dev would say Swift has "strictly better OOP support."
You don't have to agree it's a large difference (I don't, which was my original point), but "there is no rational explanation" just isn't true. There's a very obvious one, it's just boring.
> If there is no rational explanation, as you, me, and everyone else has alluded to earlier, then clearly that isn't what they meant.
My position was never "there is no rational explanation." My position was "the difference is small enough that 'strictly better' was a weird thing to say." Those are different claims! You're kind of merging me into your argument when we don't actually agree.
> Won't help communicate with anyone else meaning that you are the only one capable of understanding the logic chain?
No, I meant that if you say "C++ is a functional programming language" to mass, any working programmer, they will not understand you, because that is not what those words mean to them. It's not about intelligence, it's about shared vocabulary. You've built a internally-consistent taxonomy where functional = data + functions, OOP = data + message passing, and imperative = data and functions separate. I can follow it fine. But you've redefined three terms that already have widespread, different meanings, and then you're treating disagreement as confusion. That's the communication problem.
> You've built a internally-consistent taxonomy
I'm certainly not clever enough to have built it. Not to mention that the person who coined OOP is quite famous for having done so. I am not him, I can assure you. I have merely ingested it from what is out there in widespread circulation.
I can appreciate that you live in a different bubble and what is widespread there is not the same. It's a pretty big world out there. However, it doesn't really matter as if "C++ is a functional programming language" doesn't jive with your understanding, as you'll simply ask: "What ever do you mean?" and which point "functional programming language" will be defined and a shared understanding will be reached.
This isn't the problem you are imagining.
> I did.
Right. Seems we encountered a communication barrier again. "That's the thing man, there isn't anything." in my world would read "That's the thing man, there are things and here they are: ..." However, this highlights again that it doesn't actually harm communication as further clarification follows and eventually everyone will reach a shared understanding. Communication isn't some kind of TV game show where you have to get the right answer on your first try. This is not a problem in any way, shape, or form.
> I'm certainly not clever enough to have built it.
Ha, don't sell yourself short, you're doing a great job defending it.
> However, it doesn't really matter as if "C++ is a functional programming language" doesn't jive with your understanding, you'll simply ask: "What ever do you mean?"
Okay, genuinely, let's try this exercise. You say to me "C++ is a functional programming language." I ask "What ever do you mean?" You say "data is grouped with functions." I say "...that's also true of Python, JavaScript, Kotlin, Scala, Dart, TypeScript, and basically every language designed after 1990. What term do you use for Haskell?" And now we're in another 20-message thread defining terms from scratch instead of talking about the actual thing.
Like, you've got a taxonomy where imperative/functional/OOP is a clean trichotomy based on how data relates to code. That's elegant! But it also means "functional programming" contains both Haskell and Java, which in practice need to be distinguished from each other far more often than they need to be grouped together. The Kay-pure definitions give you clean categories at the cost of useful ones.
*Obj-C doesn't even pass muster of the Kay-pure definition, which renders the whole conversation moot.*
> "That's the thing man, there isn't anything." in my world would read "That's the thing man, there are things and here they are: ..."
Okay, fair hit. :) What I meant was: there's nothing that would make a C++ team say "strictly better." Swift has classes with inheritance, sure. But "strictly better" implies Rust can't even get close, and it can-you just model things differently. The Ladybird team discovered this themselves, which is... kind of the whole story here? They said "strictly better OOP support," tried it, and now have removed Swift. The claim didn't survive contact with their own codebase. That was the entire point of my original comment sitting at -3. (now at +2)
> Communication isn't some kind of TV game show where you have to get the right answer on your first try.
No, but Hacker News comments at -3 do get grayed out and collapsed, so in practice it kind of is, unfortunately.
> What term do you use for Haskell?
In the context of the dimension we have been talking about, it is also functional. There is no difference between Haskell, Python, Java, etc. in that particular dimension. All of those languages you list are quite different in other dimensions, of course. Are you under the impression that programming languages are one dimensional? Unfortunately, that is not the case.
> And now we're in another 20-message thread defining terms from scratch instead of talking about the actual thing.
Especially when we find out that what we really wanted to talk about was type systems. Thinking of programming languages as being one dimensional is a fool's errand.
> But it also means "functional programming" contains both Haskell and Java, which in practice need to be distinguished from each other far more often than they need to be grouped together.
Right, there may be a need to separate them, but sensibly you would separate them on the dimension that is relevant to the separation intent, not some other arbitrary quality. For example, perhaps your interest is in separating mutability and immutability. Therefore, something like "Haskell is an immutable-by-default programming language" would be an appropriate statement in that desired context. "Haskell is a statically-typed programming language", not so much.
> No, but Hacker News comments at -3 do get grayed out and collapsed, so in practice it kind of is, unfortunately.
I'll still read your comments if they turn grey. I don't care about what color they are. This isn't a problem.
You just need to define a trait, then you can use dynamic dispatch.
You can, but then you don't get any of what OOP actually offers. Message passing isn't the same thing as dynamic dispatch. OOP is a very different paradigm.
I think you are both unknowingly talking past each other: my understanding is that Smalltalk-style "object-oriented programming" ("everything is a message!") is quite distinct from C++/C#/Java/Rust "object-oriented programming" ("my structs have methods!")
Right, the former is what OOP is. The latter, encapsulating data in "objects", is functional programming.
They are both OOP, just as a "football" can be either spherical or oblong.
Functional programming is not "encapsulating data in 'objects'". Such a model would naturally feature methods like "void Die.roll()", "void list.Add(element)" which are definitely not functional programming (which emphasizes immutability, pure functions, composition, etc.)
> They are both OOP, just as a "football" can be either spherical or oblong.
They are both OOP like a football can be something that you use in a sport and something that flies you to the moon. Except it is not clear what flies you to the moon goes by "football".
> Such a model would naturally feature methods like "void Die.roll()", "void list.Add(element)" which are definitely not functional programming
Exactly, functional programming. `Die` and `list` encapsulate data and use higher order functions to operate on it, which is what defines functional programming.
> which emphasizes [...] pure functions
Functions without encapsulation is imperative programming. If you introduce encapsulation then, yes, you have functional programming, just like your examples above.
Immutability is a disjoined property that can optionally apply to all of these programming paradigms. OOP, functional, and imperative programs can all be immutable, or not.
Composition and encapsulation go hand in hand, so that one is also functional programming, yes. And certainly composition is core to languages like C++/Java/Rust/etc. Naturally, them being functional languages.
To reiterate:
- Imperative programming: Data and functions are separate.
- Functional programming: Data is grouped with functions.
- Object-oriented programming: Data is grouped with message responders.
You're welcome to insist that your definitions are canonical ("the objective in football is to kick the ball into the net"), but they are at odds with the rest of the thread
Just as you are welcome to come up with other definitions. Although last time you tried they ended up being quite inconsistent, so one does need to be careful if you want them to be useful.
These definitions are not at odds with the discussion at hand at all. It was clearly stated that Swift has better OO support. Which is obviously true because it tries to be compatible with Objective-C, and therefore needs to have some level of OO support. That is something that Rust has no interest in doing, and rightfully so.
Your redefinition violates the claim, and therefore we can logically determine that it is not what was being used in the rest of the thread. That is, aside from the confused Rust guy that set this tangent in motion, but the remainder of this thread was merely clarifying to him what was originally intended. "He has a different definition for OOP" doesn't really help his understanding. That is what this thread branch has always been about, so it is not clear where you are trying to go with that.
I think we have seen enough since the best example of a Rust browser that is Servo, has taken them 14 years to reach v0.0.1.
So the approach of having a new language that requires a full rewrite (even with an LLM) is still a bad approach.
Fil-C likely can do the job without a massive rewrite and achieving safety for C and C++.
Job done.
EDIT: The authors of Ladybird have already dismissed using Rust, and with Servo progressing at a slow pace it clearly shows that Ladybird authors do not want something like that to happen to the project.
Until just a couple years ago, Servo had been a pure research project with no goal of ever releasing a full browser (and it was abandoned by Mozilla in 2020).
Igalia had five engineers working full time who turned that science project into v0.0.1 in less than two years.
> Fil-C likely can do the job without a massive rewrite and achieving safety for C and C++.
So long as you don't mind a 2-4x performance & memory usage cost.
Servo was essentially integrated into Firefox. It was not a browser in itself until it was put into a foundation on its own.
Only few isolated parts were integrated into Firefox, everything else was simply thrown away and abandoned, and IMO it was for a good reason.
I've been programming in Rust for 5 years and I could barely understand the code in their repo. Not because it was somehow advanced but because it didn't make any sense. It felt like that with every decision they could make, they always chose the hardest way.
On the other hand, I have never done any C++ (besides few tutorials) in my life and yet I found both Serenity/Ladybird and also WebKit to be very readable and understandable.
BTW: If anyone wants to reply that Rust is different then yes, of course it is - but that's the point, if there is a language that maps nicely to your problem domain, it's also very fast, and well-understood then why the hell you'd use a language that is well-known to NOT map to OOP?
The RUST ecosystem barely just started getting into shape on the GUI toolkits frontend... So perhaps save your criticisms for something that wasn't born out of the vacuum.
> Fil-C likely can do the job
> Job done.
Seems like you forgot a few stops in your train of thought, Speed Racer.
This comment needs another 'EDIT'.
They demonstrated that swift's c++ interop isn't good enough, but does it follow that rust's is better? Genuinely asking, as I don't have experience with that. I would imagine that if they rejected it for that reason originally they forsaw even more severe issues.
> Why did Ladybird even attempt this with Swift, but (I presume) not with Rust? I
Probably the same reason why Rust is problematic in game development. The borrow checker and idiomatic Rust do not go well together with things that demand cyclic dependencies/references. Obviously there are ways around it but they're not very ergonomic/productive.
Swift actually has excellent C++ interop [1] (compared to other languages, but, I guess, not good enough for Ladybird).
[1] https://www.swift.org/documentation/cxx-interop/
I actually looked into that recently (calling C++ from Swift), and I was surprised by the amount of limitations.
Said differently: the C++ interop did not support calling the C++ library I wanted to use, so I wrote a C wrapper.
Binding to C++ is an extremely difficult and complex problem for any language that is similarly rich and has lots of (seemingly) equivalent features. The number of subtle incompatibilities and edge cases becomes nearly endless. It's not surprising that some C++ code can't be bound properly.
Yeah, that's what I realised. But I just wanted to mention that this is not what I was expecting from "excellent" interop. I would say that C has excellent interop, in general.
I did this a long time ago as Swift calling Objective-C++ which can call C++ libs, in that case OpenCV. So it wasn't awful but did require making an ObjC++ wrapper, unless I did something wrong which is also possible.
Yes that makes sense. I would just rather make a C wrapper than an ObjC++ one, because then that C wrapper can be used with many other languages.
Andreas Kling said Rust lacks OO, which he says is useful for GUI coding.
He even made an attempt at creating his own language, Jakt, under SerenityOS, but perhaps felt that C++ (earlier with, now without Swift) were the pragmatic choice for Ladybird.
But wasn’t Rust designed specifically for being a language for developing a rendering engine / web browser?
Rust initially started as a hobby project of a person who happened to be a Mozilla employee and later got sponsored by the foundation however it was not a language that was specifically designed with browsers in mind.
The language's largest project before it hit 1.0 was Servo. The language wasn't designed for browsers, but it certainly was informed by them and their struggles with maintaining and developing Firefox.
a lot of early rust design was driven by Servo - an internal mozilla project, and firefox component prototypes
How could browsers not be on his mind when his job was to contribute to Firefox as a dev?
Do your hobbies revolve around the benefits for your employer? I don't mean it in a snarky way either, but given that Rust was initially written in OCaml, you could see how it could go like "I like programming, I like type systems but I want something procedural over functional so let me give it a go".
It can be described as a hobby project only in the sense that his employer would probably prefer that he spend all his time working on Firefox.
Tools to do X better are often designed by people who get paid a lot to do X and worry about losing their job if they are not good enough at X.
If he were to tell me that he didn't imagine Rust's helping with browser dev when he designed Rust, then I'd believe him, but the "circumstantial" evidence points strongly in the other direction.
> Rust designed specifically for being a language for developing a rendering engine
Rust was born at Mozilla, sort of. It was created by a Mozilla employee. The first "real" project to put it into action was Servo of which parts were adopted into Firefox. While Rust may not have been developed "specifically" to create a browser, it is a fair comment.
That said, Ladybird was started as part of the SerenityOS project. That entire project was built using C++. If the original goal of Serenity was to build an opeerating system, C++ would have felt like a reasonable choice at the time.
By the time Ladybird was looking for "better" languages than C++, Ladybird was already a large project and was making very heavy use of traditional OOP. Rust was evaluated but rejected because it did not support OOP well. Or, at least, it did not support integration into a large, C++ based, OOP project.
Perhaps, if Ladybird had first selected a languge to write a browser from scratch, they would have gone with Rust. We will never know,
We do know that Mozilla, despite being the de facto stewards of Rust at the time, and having a prototype web browser written in Rust (Servo), decided to drop both Rust and Servo. So, perhaps using Rust for browsers is not as open and shut as you imply.
I stand corrected, I was always under the impression that Rust was created specifically for Servo; TIL.
As someone who was on that team for a long time, we took that into consideration, but it was never specifically for that. There was some stuff the Servo team would have liked us to have implemented that we didn’t.
No. It was developed as a general purpose language.
I think you are conflating the development of Servo with the design and development of Rust.
Might not be the best choice for browser chrome, where an OOP paradigm for GUIs might make sense.
It will be interesting to see any further justification; I believe Rust was rejected previously because of the DOM hierarchy/OOP but not sure IIRC.
20240810 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41208836 Ladybird browser to start using Swift language this fall
Here's Andreas Kling's general thoughts on Rust:
- Excellent for short-lived programs that transform input A to output B
- Clunky for long-lived programs that maintain large complex object graphs
- Really impressive ecosystem
- Toxic community
https://x.com/awesomekling/status/1822241531501162806
I think that's fair. Funny to have a language that makes it prohibitively difficult to use most of the core computer science constructs (lists, graphs etc.).
I so wholeheartedly agree. You are making a new web browser - akin to a new OS - and you want it open source for everybody but you choose swift not rust?
This experiment has shown that both are actually bad choices.
Oh? They tried rust?
Lots of people seem really committed to OOP. Rust is definitely a bad fit if you can't imagine writing code without classes and objects. I don't think this makes rust is a bad language for the problem. Its just, perhaps, makes rust a bad language for some programmers.
It doesn't seem uncommon for someone to generally like Rust but still want to use something OO for UI. I'm in that boat. Never liked OOP much, but it makes sense sometimes.
What OO features are you thinking of that Rust doesn't have?
Traits give you the ability to model typical GUI OO hierarchies, e.g.:
Implementation inheritance can be achieved with good old shared functions that take trait arguments, like this: You can also define default methods at the trait level.This all ends up being much more precise, clear, and strongly typed than the typical OO inheritance model, while still following a similar overall structure.
You can see real world examples of this kind of thing in the various GUI toolkits for Rust, like Iced, gpui, egui, Dioxus, etc.
You can do OO this way if you really want in Rust, kinda like how you can do it in C, but it gets cumbersome. Especially because there's no GC.
But it's not "kinda how you can do it in C". Traits are a core feature of Rust, any non-trivial Rust program uses them. Traits alone give you polymorphism across disparate types, exactly as in OO - actually better than standard OO (without interfaces), because trait polymorphism works without requiring inheritance from a common ancestor.
> Especially because there's no GC.
This is the only real issue I can think of. However, for implementing something like a UI, automatic GC isn't really necessary because the lifetime of widgets etc. maps very well to the lexical/RAII model. Windows own widgets, etc. Again, see all the UI toolkits implemented in Rust.
I know the Rust trait system has an answer to every OO concept. Another is that data field inheritance is replaced by composition. But these are more workarounds for the rarer cases you want to do OO in Rust, not the intended usual path, and doing OOP this way will get tedious. Otherwise, there'd be no difference and everyone would call Rust an OO language.
Not so sure about not needing GC. Many times a problem seems easy without GC until you get into the weeds. Like why did ObjC feel the need to add ARC (not GC but similar goal)?
> But these are more workarounds for the rarer cases you want to do OO in Rust, not the intended usual path, and doing OOP this way will get tedious.
It sounds like you're speculating. But this doesn't match the reality of actual Rust code. For example, here's the complete, actual code for the `Widget` trait implementation for the `Button` struct in the egui framework:
(From: https://github.com/emilk/egui/blob/main/crates/egui/src/widg... , bottom of page.)This is OO code. It's just that it's trait-oriented, not class-oriented. But that's a good thing, not a drawback. Traits are more precise, more flexible, more type-safe, and don't conflate multiple unrelated concerns in a single feature the way class inheritance does. OO languages like Java support a very similar approach, via interfaces.
You can find similar code in any Rust GUI library, and indeed in almost any non-trivial Rust program.
> Otherwise, there'd be no difference and everyone would call Rust an OO language.
Rust is not a class-based OO language. But the fact that one of its core features, traits, have "methods", and those methods have a first argument traditionally named `self` should be a clue. Trait-based OO is very much OO. Whether "Rust is an OO language" depends on how strictly you want to define "OO" to match the rather obsolete 1970s conception of it.
This is why the first question I asked you was "What OO features are you thinking of that Rust doesn't have?" Because "OO" is a broad label that covers a wide range of different features.
Rust doesn't have "classes", but classes are a 1970s-era mish-mash of a whole bunch of different concerns munged together into a single poorly-factored construct. Now, half a century later, that's well understood, and better solutions exist in the form of traits and interfaces, and related capabilities.
> Like why did ObjC feel the need to add ARC (not GC but similar goal)?
Same reason Rust includes `Rc` and `Arc`. A general-purpose language has to provide some solution to memory management based on reachability. Reference counting and tracing GC are common solutions to that. Rust's static memory management plus RC is plenty good enough for GUI applications.
Indeed, chapter 18 in The Book stops short of claiming that Rust is object oriented. But it's clearly written to highlight the good parts of object-oriented design that Rust has adopted.
Every "OO for UI" approach I've seen breaks most of the rules of object-oriented design.
GTK, Qt, DOM, WinUI 3, Swing, Jetpack Compose, and GWT (to name a few) all provide getters and setters or public properties for GUI state, violating the encapsulation principle [1]. The TextBox/EditBox/Entry control is the perfect example.
The impedance mismatch is that a GUI control is not an object [2]. And yet, all of the object-orient GUI examples listed implement their controls as objects. The objects are not being used for the strengths of OO, it's just an implementation detail for a procedural API. The reason these GUIs don't provide an API like shown in [1] is because it's an impractical design.
"How are you supposed to design an OO TextEdit GUI control if it can't provide a getter/setter for the text that it owns?" Exactly. You're not supposed to. OOP is not the right model for GUIs.
Ironically, SwiftUI doesn't have this problem because it uses the Elm Architecture [3] like React and iced.
[1]: https://www.infoworld.com/article/2163972/building-user-inte...
[2]: From [1], "All the rules in the rule-of-thumb list above essentially say the same thing — that the inner state of an object must be hidden. In fact, the last rule in the list (“All objects must provide their own UI”) really just follows from the others. If access to the inner state of an object is impossible, then the UI, which by necessity must access the state information, must be created by the object whose state is being displayed."
[3]: https://guide.elm-lang.org/architecture/
Right, in this context people are not taking such a strict definition of OO.
The ladybird developers tried Rust and Swift both and voted to adopt Swift.
Also I believe one of the core LadyBird devs was an ex Apple employee on WebKit which has been using Swift as well.
The Ladybird founder was one of the original KHTML devs and worked on Safari at Apple.
I’m not even sure he was at Apple when Swift came out. WebKit integration is very recent.
Swift doesn't use a garbage collector.
ARC is GC, Swift definitely uses GC.
It isn't a _tracing_ GC
I remember watching the project lead say something like “the developers just don’t enjoy rust”
Swift != GC
Not too surprising. Swift is too tied to Apple and it's not really clear what the benefit would be relative to a subset of C++ written with contemporary memory safety practices. It's a battle tested choice and pretty much every browser actually in use is written in C++.
> It's a battle tested choice and pretty much every browser actually in use is written in C++.
Every browser in use is stuck with C++ because they're in way too deep at this point, but Chromium and Firefox are both chipping away at it bit by bit and replacing it with safer alternatives where they feasibly can. Chromium even blocked JPEG-XL adoption until there was a safe implementation because they saw the reference C++ decoder as such a colossal liability.
IMO the takeaway is that although those browsers do use a ton of C++ and probably always will, their hard-won lessons have led them to wish they didn't have to, and to write a brand new browser in C++ is just asking to needlessly repeat all of the same mistakes. Chromium uses C++ because Webkit used C++ because KHTML used C++ in 1998. Today we have the benefit of hindsight.
> Chromium even blocked JPEG-XL adoption until there was a safe implementation because they saw the reference C++ decoder as such a colossal liability.
Quickly followed by several vulnerabilities in that reference library as well; good move
TBF that's less a C++ thing and more that there have been several high profile decoder vulnerabilities over the past however many years. Enough that Google created the custom language WUFFS for the express purpose of implementing secure parsers for arbitrary file formats.
It's emblematic of C++ devs penchant for not implementing error handling on invalid input because of the "safety net" of exceptions and not bothering to properly handle errors or exceptions.
It's probably okay to solve one problem at a time: first solve the "free open source browser, developed from the Web standard specs" problem in an established language (C++), and then the "reimplement all of part of it in a more suitable (safer, higher productivity) language - yet to be devised - problem.
And Andreas Kling already proved the naysayers wrong when he showd that a new operating system and Web browser can be written entirely from scratch, the former not even using any standard libraries; so beware when you are inclined to say 'not feasible'.
Maybe? I feel like there's been lots of efforts to migrate large C++ codebases over the years, and few actually complete the migration. Heck, Google is even making Carbon to try to solve this.
migrating any large project is going to be billions of dollars worth of labor. Language isn't a large factor in that cost, you can save few tens of millions at most with a better language.
Can you give me some reasoning behind this statement ("language isn't a large factor in the cost of migrating a large project")?
I'm struggling to think of a larger factor
The large factor is the amount of work to create everything again. Plenty has been written about large re-writes, they can and have worked out in the long run, but generally it takes a decade for the new to be as good as the old - either it is missing critical features or it has too many bugs.
> a subset of C++ written with contemporary memory safety practices
What is this mythical subset of C++? Does it include use of contemporary STL features like string_view? (Don’t get me wrong — modern STL is considerably improved, but it’s not even close to being memory-safe.)
> What is this mythical subset of C++
Ladybird inherits its C++ from SerenityOS. Ladybird has an almost completely homegrown standard library including their own pointer classes and a couple of different string classes that do some interesting things with memory. But perhaps the most novel stuff are things like TRY and MUST: https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/blob/master/Documenta...
You see this reflected all the way back to the main function. Here is the main entry function for the entire browser:
ErrorOr<int> ladybird_main(Main::Arguments arguments).
https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird/blob/master/UI/Q...
If Ladybird is successful, I would not be surprised to see its standard library take off with other projects. Again, it is really the SerenityOS standard library but the SerenityOS founder left the project to focus on Ladybird. So, that is where this stuff evolves now.
So interesting to hear about the internals of the browser, how it evolved from a standard library in an OS project. It's the kind of insight that's rarely documented, spoken about, or even known to anybody other than the author.
I can totally imagine how a prolific and ambitious developer would create a world of their own, essentially another language with domain-specific vocabulary and primitives. People often talk about using a "subset of C++" to make it manageable for mortals, and I think the somewhat unusual consideration of Swift was related to this desire for an ergonomic language to express and solve the needs of the project.
They probable mean safe code like this:
memory safety isn't really much of a problem with modern C++. We have the range library now for instance. What's nice about modern C++ is you can almost avoid most manual loops and talk at the algorithm level.
Are we talking about the same range library? The one that showed up in C++20 and is basically just iterator pairs dressed up nicely? The one where somehow the standard thought all memory safety issues with iterations could be summed up with a single “borrowed” bit? The one where instead of having a nice loop you can also build a little loop body pipeline and pass it as a parameter and have exactly the same iterator invalidation and borrowing problems that C++ has had since day 1?
Ranges are not memory safe. Sorry.
And yet in practice, it's been less than a week since a major CVE in Chromium due to memory unsafety: https://chromereleases.googleblog.com/2026/02/stable-channel...
Having a checklist of "things not to do" is historically a pretty in effectiveway to ensure memory safety, which is why the parent comment was asking for details. The fact that this type of thing gets dismissed as a non-issue is honestly a huge part of the problem in my opinion; it's time to move on from pretending this is a skill issue.
Wasn't Rust developed specifically for Mozilla? Isn't mozilla written in Rust?
Only parts of it. Servo is the engine written in Rust, some of which ended up in Mozilla.
Firefox has some Rust components but it isn't written in Rust overall. Servo is written in Rust but it isn't a full browser.
Servo is slowly but steadily getting there. The thing with Servo is that it's highly modularized and some of its components are widely used by the larger Rust ecosystem, even it the whole browser engine isn't. So there's multi-pronged vested interest in developing it.
Moreover, Servo aims to be embeddable (there are some working examples already), which is where other non-Chrome/ium browsers are failing (and Firefox too). Thanks to this it has much better chance at wider adoption and actually spawning multiple browsers.
> The thing with Servo is that it's highly modularized and some of its components are widely used by the larger Rust ecosystem, even it the whole browser engine isn't.
Alas not nearly as modularized as it could be. I think it's mainly just Stylo and WebRender (the components that got pulled into Firefox), and html5ever (the HTML parser) that are externally consumable.
Text and layout support are two things that could easily be ecosystem modules but aren't seemingly (from my perspective) because the ambition to be modular has been lost.
I've seen recent talk about swappable js engine, so I'm unsure about the ambition being lost. I'm eyeing Blitz too (actually tried to use it in one of my projects but the deps fucked me up).
Mozilla laid off the Servo team years ago.
Servo was passed onto Linux Foundation and is still being developed, some of its components are shared with Firefox.
Yet, after all these years its browser is quite frankly pre-historic.
Servo's history is much more complicated and originally was planned to be used for the holo lens before the layoff. Comparing trajectory doesn't make sense they had completely different goals and directions.
What are you talking about? It doesn't have a "browser", it has a testing shell. For a time there was actual attempt with the Verso experiment but it got shelved just recently. Servo is working at being embeddable at the same time when Rust GUI toolkits are maturing. Once it gets embedding stabilized that will be the time for a full blown browser developement.
> It doesn't have a "browser", it has a testing shell.
So, yes it is still pre-historic.
> Once it gets embedding stabilized that will be the time for a full blown browser developement.
Servo development began in 2012. [0] 14 years later we get a v0.0.1.
At this point, Ladybird will likely reach 1.0 faster than Servo could, and the latter is not even remotely close to being usable even in 14 years of waiting.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servo_(software)
> At this point, Ladybird will likely reach 1.0 faster than Servo could, and the latter is not even remotely close to being usable even in 14 years of waiting.
When Servo is done, it's going to be a beast.
It's getting hundreds of commits per week:
https://github.com/servo/servo/graphs/commit-activity
It's by no means accurate, but the comparative histories of Ladybird vs. Servo sure has some parallels with Linux vs. GNU Hurd.
This is disingenuous. Servo is using RUST, language which grew together with it, pretty much, and all components surrounding it. C++ is how old, please remind me?
You could make almost any non-C non-C++ project good by that metric.
And no, they're not being disingenuous.
Yes and yes. Firefox is partially written in Rust.
Well, it was a terrible idea in any case unless it was for high-level-ish code only. Swift generally can't compete with C++ in raw performance (in the same way as Java - yeah, there are benchmarks where it's faster, but it basically doesn't happen in real programs).
Hurray for micro benchmarks. Anyway, every language can be abused. I can make Java run slower than Ruby. Given that it runs on Microcontrollers on billions of devices, I don't think Swift is necessarily the problem in whatever case you have in mind (And yes I stole oracle's java marketing there for Swift, it is true though.)
[dead]
It wasn't the reason why it was removed, but, well we agree, it would have been a problem if used indiscriminately. I didn't do any additional research, but what I read in public was simply "Ladybird is going to use Swift".
Their Mac UI is a thin layer of AppKit. Even there they're currently using Objective-C++ it looks like, not Swift:
https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird/tree/master/UI/A...
Hi, I'm the one who originally wrote Ladybird's AppKit UI. Just FYI, it was written long before Ladybird split from SerenityOS, and even longer before Swift was on the table. I only chose Objective-C++ because it was the language I was familiar with at the time :)
Swift is Apple's toy language and they cannot and will not allow it to be anything more than that.
Ah, that's too bad. Does that mean their own programming language, Jakt, is back on the table?
Ladybird split from SerenityOS a while ago, Jakt is not "their" language. And no, I don't think a niche programming language is on the table.
Jfc why do they not just use rust? Is it the c++ addiction dominating?
Rust isn't OO is their main issue at this point.
For their sake, I hope not. I don't think an outside-donation-financed project with this much ADD can survive in the long term.
It's frustrating to discuss. It is a wonderful case study in how not to make engineering management decisions, and yet, they've occurred over enough time, and the cause is appealing enough, that it's hard to talk about out loud in toto without sounding like a dismissive jerk.
Maybe I misunderstand, but I thought Jakt was part of SerenityOS, not Ladybird.
From what I can tell they're pretty laser focused on making a browser (even in this issue, they're abandoning Swift).
> From what I can tell they're pretty laser focused on making a browser
I agree with you. I also agree that this decision is an example of that.
SerenityOS had an "everything from scratch in one giant mono-repo" rule. It was, explicitly a hobby project and one rooted in enjoyment and 'idealism from the get go. It was founded by a man looking for something productive to focus on instead of drugs. It was therapy. Hence the name.
Ladybird, as an independent project, was founded with the goal of being the only truly independent web browser (independent from corporate control generally and Google specifically).
They have been very focussed on that, have not had any sacred cows, and have shed A LOT of the home-grown infrastructure they inherited from being part of SerenityOS. Sometimes that saddens me a little but there is no denying that it has sped them up.
Their progress has been incredible. This comment is being written in Ladybird. I have managed GitHub projects in Ladybird. I have sent Gmail messages in Ladybird. It is not "ready" but it blows my mind how close it is.
I think Ladybid will be a "usable" browser before we enter 2027. That is just plain amazing.
Yeah, Serenityos was build everything from scratch for fun. Ladybird is build where an alternative implementation is going to add value. No need to get sidetracked reinventing SSL or ffmpeg.
I remember mocking the switch to Swift back then.
Swift is a poorly designed language, slow to compile, visibly not on path to be major system language, and they had no expert on the team.
I am glad they are cutting their losses.
Swift never felt truly open source either. That people can propose evolution points doesn’t change the fact that Apple still holds all the keys and pushes whatever priorities they need, even if they’re not a good idea (e.g. Concurrency, Swift Testing etc)
Also funny enough, all cross platform work is with small work groups, some even looking for funding … anyway.
> Swift never felt truly open source either.
Apple has been always 'transactional' when it comes to OSS - they open source things only when it serves a strategic purpose. They open-sourced Swift only because they needed the community to build an ecosystem around their platform.
Yeah, well, sure they've done some work around LLVM/Clang, WebKit, CUPS, but it's really not proportional to the size and the influence they still have.
Compare them to Google, with - TensorFlow, k8s, Android (nominally), Golang, Chrome, and a long tail of other shit. Or Meta - PyTorch and the Llama model series. Or even Microsoft, which has dramatically reversed course from its "open source is a cancer" era (yeah, they were openly saying that, can you believe it?) to becoming one of the largest contributors on GitHub.
Apple I've heard even have harshest restrictions about it - some teams are just not permitted to contribute to OSS in any way. Obsessively secretive and for what price? No wonder that Apple's software products are just horrendously bad, if not all the time - well, too often. And on their own hardware too.
I wouldn't mind if Swift dies, I'm glad Objective-C is no longer relevant. In fact, I can't wait for Swift to die sooner.
> WebKit
Sort of an exception that proves the rule. Yes, it's great and was released for free. But at least partially that's not a strategic decision from Apple but just a requirement of the LGPLv2 license[1] under which they received it (as KHTML) originally.
And even then, it was Blink and not WebKit that ended up providing better value to the community.
[1] It does bear pointing out that lots of the new work is dual-licensed as 2-clause BSD also. Though no one is really trying to test a BSD-only WebKit derivative, as the resulting "Here's why this is not a derived work of the software's obvious ancestor" argument would be awfully dicey to try to defend. The Ship of Theseus is not a recognized legal principle, and clean rooms have historically been clean for a reason.
>> some teams are just not permitted to contribute to OSS in any way
My understanding is that by default you are not allowed to contribute to open-source even if its your own project. Exceptions are made for teams whose function is to work on those open-source project e.g. Swift/LLVM/etc...
I talked to an apple engineer at a bar years ago and he said they aren’t allowed to work on _anything_ including side projects without getting approval first. Seemed like a total wtf moment to me.
I have never had a non wtf moment talking to an apple software engineer at a bar.
I can recall one explaining to me in the mid 20 teens that the next iPhone would be literally impossible to jailbreak in any capacity with 100% confidence.
I could not understand how someone that capable(he was truly bright) could be that certain. That is pure 90s security arrogance. The only secure computer is one powered off in a vault, and even then I am not convinced.
Multiple exploits were eventually found anyway.
We never exchanged names. That’s the only way to interact with engineers like that and talk in real terms.
This is interesting, I knew a workplace where open source contributions are fine as long as its not on company PC and network.
Every programming job I've ever had, I've been required at certain points to make open source contributions. Granted, that was always "we have an issue with this OSS library/software we use, your task this sprint is to get that fixed".
I won't say never, but it would take an exceedingly large comp plan for me to sign paperwork forbidding me from working on hobby projects. That's pretty orwellian. I'm not allowed to work on hobby projects on company time, but that seems fair, since I also can't spend work hours doing non-programming hobbies either.
No, as far as I know, at Apple, this is strict - you cannot contribute to OSS, period. Not from your own equipment nor your friend's, not even during a vacation. It may cost you your job. Of course, it's not universal for every team, but on teams I know a few people - that's what I heard. Some companies just don't give a single fuck of what you want or need, or where your ideals lie.
I suspect it's not just Apple, I have "lost" so many good GitHub friends - incredible artisans and contributors, they've gotten well-payed jobs and then suddenly... not a single green dot on the wall since. That's sad. I hope they're getting paid more than enough.
WebKit started as a fork of the KHTML and KJS libraries from KDE.
The fact that Swift is an Apple baby should indeed be considered a red flag. I know there are some Objective-C lovers out there but I think it is an abomination.
Apple is (was?) good at hardware design and UX, but they pretty bad at producing software.
For what it’s worth, ObjC is not Apple’s brainchild. It just came along for the ride when they chose NEXTSTEP as the basis for Mac OS X.
I haven’t used it in a couple decades, but I do remember it fondly. I also suspect I’d hate it nowadays. Its roots are in a language that seemed revolutionary in the 80s and 90s - Smalltalk - and the melding of it with C also seemed revolutionary at the time. But the very same features that made it great then probably (just speculating - again I haven’t used it in a couple decades) aren’t so great now because a different evolutionary tree leapfrogged ahead of it. So most investment went into developing different solutions to the same problems, and ObjC, like Smalltalk, ends up being a weird anachronism that doesn’t play so nicely with modern tooling.
I've never written whole applications in ObjC but have had to dabble with it as part of Ardour (ardour.org) implementation details for macOS.
I think it's a great language! As long as you can tolerate dynamic dispatch, you really do get the best of C/C++ combined with its run-time manipulable object type system. I have no reason to use it for more code than I have to, but I never grimace if I know I'm going to have to deal with it. Method swizzling is such a neat trick!
It is, and that’s part of what I loved about it. But it’s also the kind of trick that can quickly become a source of chaos on a project with many contributors and a lot of contributor churn, like we tend to get nowadays. Because - and this was the real point of Dijkstra’s famous paper; GOTO was just the most salient concrete example at the time - control flow mechanisms tend to be inscrutable in proportion to their power.
And, much like what happened to GOTO 40 years ago, language designers have invented less powerful language features that are perfectly acceptable 90% solutions. e.g. nowadays I’d generally pick higher order functions or the strategy pattern over method swizzling because they’re more amenable to static analysis and easier to trace with typical IDE tooling.
I don't really want to defend method swizzling (it's grotesque from some entirely reasonable perspectives). However, it does work on external/3rd party code (e.g. audio plugins) even when you don't have control over their source code. I'm not sure you can pull that off with "better" approaches ...
That’s the main use case I can think of. It’s possible with other languages but may require more hacking.
I like monkey patching for testing legacy code. I like it less as a thing in production code because it can become a security and reliability problem.
Problem come when a third-party code do that swizzling, looking at you every iOS analytics framework to this day.
Many of the built-in types in Objective C all have names beginning with “NS” like “NSString”. The NS stands for NeXTSTEP. I always found it insane that so many years later, every iPhone on Earth was running software written in a language released in the 80s. It’s definitely a weird language, but really quite pleasant once you get used to it, especially compared to other languages from the same time period. It’s truly remarkable they made something with such staying power.
>It’s truly remarkable they made something with such staying power
What has had the staying power is the API because that API is for an operating system that has had that staying power. As you hint, the macOS of today is simply the evolution of NeXTSTEP (released in 1989). And iOS is just a light version of it.
But 1989 is not all that remarkable. The Linux API (POSIX) was introduced in 1988 but started in 1984 and based on an API that emerged in the 70s. And the Windows API goes back to 1985. Apple is the newest API of the three.
As far as languages go, the Ladybird team is abandoning Swift to stick with C++ which was released back in 1979. And of course C++ is just an evolution of C which goes back to 1972 and which almost all of Linux is still written in.
And what is Ladybird even? It is an HTML interpretter. HTML was introduced in 1993. Guess what operating system HTML and the first web browser was created on. That is right...NeXTSTEP.
In some ways ObjC’s and the NEXTSTEP API’s staying power is more impressive because they survived the failure of their relatively small patron organization. POSIX and C++ were developed at and supported by tech titans - the 1970s and 1980s equivalents of FAANG. Meanwhile back at the turn of the century we had all witnessed the demise of NeXT and many of us were anticipating the demise of Apple, and there was no particularly strong reason to believe that a union of the two would fare any better, let alone grow to become one of the A’s in FAANG.
I actually suspect that ObjC and the NeXT APIs played a big part in that success. I know they’ve fallen out of favor now, and for reasons I have to assume are good. But back in the early 2000s, the difference in how quickly I could develop a good GUI for OS X compared to what I was used to on Windows and GNOME was life changing. It attracted a bunch of developers to the platform, not just me, which spurred an accumulation of applications with noticeably better UX that, in turn, helped fuel Apple’s consumer sentiment revival.
Good take. Even back in the 1990s, OpenStep was thought to be the best way to develop a Windows app. But NeXT charged per-seat licenses, so it didn't get much use outside of Wall Street or other places where Jobs would personally show up. And of course something like iPhone is easier when they already had a UI framework and an IDE and etc.
Well, there are many more devices running on a language written in the 70s.
Assuming you mean C (C++ is an 80s child), that’s trivially true because devices with an ObjC SDK are a strict subset of devices that are running on C.
Yes, that is why I don't find it "insane" like the grandparent does, like yeah, devices run old languages because those languages work well for their intended purpose.
You should feel that C’s longevity is insane. How many languages have come and gone in the meantime? C is truly an impressive language that profoundly moved humanity forward. If that’s not insane (used colloquially) to you, then what is?
> I always found it insane that so many years later, every iPhone on Earth was running software written in a language released in the 80s.
The constantly moving target fetish coming from the javascript camp may be misguided, you know...
Next was more or less an Apple spinoff, that was later acquired by Apple. Objective-C was created because using standards is contrary to the company culture. And with Swift they are painting themselves into a corner.
> Objective-C was created because using standards is contrary to the company culture
Objective-C was actually created by a company called Stepstone that wanted what they saw as the productivity benefits of Smalltalk (OOP) with the performance and portability of C. Originally, Objective-C was seen as a C "pre-compiler".
One of the companies that licensed Objective-C was NeXT. They also saw pervasive OOP as a more productive way to build GUI applications. That was the core value proposition of NeXT.
NeXT ended up basically taking over Objective-C and then it became of a core part of Apple when Apple bought NeXT to create the next-generation of macOS (the one we have now).
So, Objective-C was actually born attempting to "use standards" (C instead of Smalltalk) and really has nothing to do with Apple culture. Of course, Apple and NeXT were brought into the world by Steve Jobs
> Objective-C was created because using standards is contrary to the company culture.
What language would you have suggested for that mission and that era? Self or Smalltalk and give up on performance on 25-MHz-class processors? C or Pascal and give up an excellent object system with dynamic dispatch?
C.
C's a great language in 1985, and a great starting point. But development of UI software is one of those areas where object oriented software really shines. What if we could get all the advantages of C as a procedural language, but graft on top an extremely lightweight object system with a spec of < 20 pages to take advantage of these new 1980s-era developments in software engineering, while keeping 100% of the maturity and performance of the C ecosystem? We could call it Objective-C.
And Objective-C is C. A strict superset, in fact.
If
really, really, really isn't to your liking, you can write or even: That's pretty much all there is to it. But I have to admit I like the syntax better:(Hi mpw)
(Hi Adam, how's the flying?)
Years ago I wrote a toy Lisp implementation in Objective-C, ignoring Apple’s standard library and implementing my own class hierarchy. At that point it was basically standard C plus Smalltalk object dispatch, and it was a very cool language for that type of project.
I haven’t used it in Apple’s ecosystem, so maybe I am way off base here. But it seems to me that it was Apple’s effort to evolve the language away from its systems roots into a more suitable applications language that caused all the ugliness.
Some refer to the “Tim Cook doctrine” as a reason for Swift’s existence. It’s not meant to be good, just to fulfill the purpose of controlling that part of their products, so they don’t have to rely on someone else’s tooling.
That doesn’t really make sense though. I thought that they hired Lattner to work on LLVM/clang so they could have a non-gpl compiler and to make whatever extensions they wanted to C/Obj-C. Remember when they added (essentially) closures to C to serve their internal purposes?
So they already got what they wanted without inventing a new language. There must be some other reason.
The Accidental Tech podcast had a long interview with Lattner about Swift in 2017 [0]. He makes it out as something that had started as side-project / exploration thing without much of an agenda, which grew mostly because of how good positive feedback the project had got from other developers. He had recently left Apple back then, and supposedly left the future of Swift in other peoples' hands.
[0] https://atp.fm/205-chris-lattner-interview-transcript#swiftc...
That sounds like Microsoft's doctrine!
I definitely agree with the first point - it's not meant to be the best.
On the second part, I think the big thing was that they needed something that would interop with Objective-C well and that's not something that any language was going to do if Apple didn't make it. Swift gave Apple something that software engineers would like a ton more than Objective-C.
I think it's also important to remember that in 2010/2014 (when swift started and when it was released), the ecosystem was a lot different. Oracle v Google was still going on and wasn't finished until 2021. So Java really wasn't on the table. Kotlin hit 1.0 in 2016 and really wasn't at a stage to be used when Apple was creating Swift. Rust was still undergoing massive changes.
And a big part of it was simply that they wanted something that would be an easy transition from Objective-C without requiring a lot of bridging or wrappers. Swift accomplished that, but it also meant that a lot of decisions around Swift were made to accommodate Apple, not things that might be generally useful to the lager community.
All languages have this to an extent. For example, Go uses a non-copying GC because Google wanted it to work with their existing C++ code more easily. Copying GCs are hard to get 100% correct when you're dealing with an outside runtime that doesn't expect things to be moved around in memory. This decision probably isn't what would be the best for most of the non-Google community, but it's also something that could be reconsidered in the future since it's an implementation detail rather than a language detail.
I'm not sure any non-Apple language would have bent over backwards to accommodate Objective-C. But also, what would Apple have chosen circa-2010 when work on Swift started? Go was (and to an extent still is) "we only do things these three Googlers think is a good idea", Go was basically brand-new at the time, and even today Go doesn't really have a UI framework. Kotlin hadn't been released when work started on Swift. C# was still closed source. Rust hadn't appeared yet and was still undergoing a lot of big changes through Swift's release. Python and other dynamic languages weren't going to fit the bill. There really wasn't anything that existed then which could have been used instead of Swift. Maybe D could have been used.
But also, is Swift bad? I think that some of the type inference stuff that makes compiles slow is genuinely a bad choice and I think the language could have used a little more editing, but it's pretty good. What's better that doesn't come with a garbage collector? I think Rust's borrow checker would have pissed off way too many people. I think Apple needed a language without a garbage collector for their desktop OS and it's also meant better battery life and lower RAM usage on mobile.
If you're looking for a language that doesn't have a garbage collector, what's better? Heck, what's even available? Zig is nice, but you're kinda doing manual memory management. I like Rust, but it's a much steeper learning curve than most languages. There's Nim, but its ARC-style system came 5+ years after Swift's introduction.
So even today and even without Objective-C, it's hard to see a language that would fit what Apple wants: a safe, non-GC language that doesn't require Rust-style stuff.
I think that their culture of trying to invent their own standards is generally bad, but it is even worse when it is a programming language. I believe they are painting themselves into a corner.
>For example, Go uses a non-copying GC because Google wanted it to work with their existing C++ code more easily. Copying GCs are hard to get 100% correct when you're dealing with an outside runtime that doesn't expect things to be moved around in memory.
Do you have a source for this?
C# has a copying GC, and easy interop with C has always been one of its strengths. From the perspective of the user, all you need to do is to "pin" a pointer to a GC-allocated object before you access it from C so that the collector avoids moving it.
I always thought it had more to do with making the implementation simpler during the early stages of development, with the possibility of making it a copying GC some time in the feature (mentioned somewhere in stdlib's sources I think) but it never came to fruition because Go's non-copying GC was fast enough and a lot of code has since been written with the assumption that memory never moves. Adding a copying GC today would probaby break a lot of existing code.
To add to this, whatever was to become Obj-C's successor needed to be just as or more well-suited for UI programming with AppKit/UIKit as Obj-C was. That alone narrows the list of candidates a lot.
To be fair, work on Swift began in 2010, which would technically predate Tim Cook's accession to the position of CEO by a year or so.
Swift has it's problems, and I certainly wouldn't use it for anything outside of development for Apple platforms, but saying they had no experts on the team is a stretch. Most Swift leads were highly regarded members of the C++ world, even if you discount Chris Lattner.
I meant no Swift experts in the Ladybird team. Their expertise is C++, you may think the transition is easy, and it can be pretty painless at first, but true language expertise means knowing how to work around its flaws, and adapting your patterns to its strenghts. Cool for a hobby, but switching language in the middle of an herculean work is suicide.
> switching language in the middle of an herculean work is suicide
My read is that that this is the main thing that happened here.
The Ladybird team is quite pragmatic. Or, at least their founder is. I think they understood the scale of buidling a browser. They understood that it was a massive undertaking. They also understood the security challenge of building an application so big that processes untrusted input as its main job. So, they thought that perhaps they needed a better language than C++ for these reasons. They evaluated a few options and came away thinking that Swift was the best, so they announced that they expected to move towards Swift in the future.
But the other side of being pragamatic is that, as time passed, they also realized how hard it would be to chagne horses. And they are quite productivity driven. They produce a YouTube video every month detailing their progress including charts and numbers.
Making no progress on the "real" job of building a browser to make progress on the somewhat artificial job of moving to a new programming language just never made sense I guess.
And the final part of being pragmatic is that, after months of not really making any progress on the switch, the founder posted this patch essentially admitting the reality and suggesting they just formalize the lack of progress and move on.
The lack of progress on Swift that is. Their progress on making a browser has been absolutely mind-blowing. This comment is being written in Ladybird.
Oh my bad, I totally misread you. I concur with the point you were actually making!
I think they were meaning that there were no swift experts on the LadyBird team
The point of Swift is not really the language, it's the standard ABI for dynamic code. The Rust folks should commit to supporting it as a kind of extern FFI/interop alongside C, at least on platforms where a standard Swift implementation exists.
What language do you recommend?
The best tool for the job is the one you know and love.
It depends. Many languages are a poor fit for certain use cases, and some are bad at everything beyond a very specific niche. Some are rather unpleasant to write any kind of substantial UI with.
Of course, writing a bootloader in Matlab or a MMORPG in Visual Basic would be masochistic. But these days people are writing CLI tools and TUI in Typescript...
By that definition you will be stuck on the first language you love.
And someone will be stuck not to do anything because they are unsatisfied with all languages. :-)
I have not developed a deep love for a language yet. Swift has been interesting me, but so has Zig.
Then you should consider Lindy effect. Newer languages have counter-intuitively a shorter life expectancy than older ones.
is go the same? what is the consensus best pick right now I wonder, is it C#?
Best pick for what? It always depends, and there is certainly no consensus.
[dead]
When does the migration to Rust start? /s
It seems like today. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47120899
Rust bros already on their way to vibecode a rustbrowser, get their rust stars on rusthub, insult anyone to point out it doesn’t work, and call it a rustday.
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
Bringing up Rust as an obvious alternative is not toxic.
There's already a stereotype that Rust people will just carpet bomb any discussion with aggressively promoting Rust, people expect it to happen at this point and it just annoys people.
So I think it probably meets the threshold of "toxic", but more importantly - it's not effective. Everyone and their dog has already heard of Rust, aggressive proselytising is not going to help drive Rust adoption, it's just pissing people off
It's probably the same people who were proselitysing blockchain and now are proselytising "AI"?
I think that's more of a financial grift in a lot of cases (how many pie-eyed AI evangelists turn out to be running some "AI startup" or otherwise have skin in the game).
The rust thing is more like actual religious evangelism, like having Jehovah's Witnesses knocking on the door. They have seen the light and you haven't
it's toxic because of how it sometimes materializes:
- predictable
- incessant
- with belittling/reductionist/arrogant/elitist/combative phrasings
- handwaving rust shortcomings and tradeoffs
It is a genuinely strange social phenomenon. What is it about Rust specifically that attracts these people?
I think they are mostly just idealists. Found a perfect programming language that allows them to claim that everything else is wrong, and rust can solve every problem under the sun.
Just wait until they discover assembly!
[flagged]
This reads like an AI response to me. Would you elaborate? I can see no reason to believe it would achieve stability based on many of the statements in this issue.
Their entire comment history reads like AI to me.
[flagged]
Sunk cost fallacy. It didn't work out, the decision was made, they move on. I like that.
> so why throw away all that time?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost
Chiming in: indeed, the response is very dry, and raises suspicion. It states the obvious facts and then makes a boring statement, lacking any nuance of the conversation. It is not argumentative in the very least.
Time has been spend, yes. But the topic at hand is after so much time the conclusion to abandon this path is justified.
I hate to be the one to point this out but really, in 10 years, how many rust ports will face the same fate?
some? It can happen with any language.
none
Great, some languages do not need to be hack into a project.
There's no way to say this without sounding mean: Everything Chris Lattner has done has been a "successful mess". He's obviously smart, but a horrible engineer. No one should allow him to design anything.
Edit: I explained my position better below.
People are correct I didn't explain my position.
LLVM: Pretty much everyone who has created a programming language with it has complained about its design. gingerbill, Jon Blow, and Andrew Kelley have all complained about it. LLVM is a good idea, but it that idea was executed better by Ken Thompson with his C compiler for Plan 9, and then again with his Go compiler design. Ken decided to create his own "architecture agnostic" assembly, which is very similar to the IR idea with LLVM.
Swift: I was very excited with the first release of Swift. But it ultimately did not have a very focused vision outlined for it. Because of this, it has morphed into a mess. It tries to be everything for everyone, like C++, and winds up being mediocre, and slow to compile to top it off.
Mojo isn't doesn't exist for the public yet. I hope it turns out to be awesome, but I'm just not going to get my hopes up this time.
Yes. I also written a compiler and I also complained about LLVM.
LLVM is
Swift I never used but I tried compiling it once and it was the bottom 2 slowest compiler I ever tested. The only thing nearly as bad was kotlin but 1) I don't actually remember which of these are worse 2) Kotlin wasn't meant to be a CLI compiler, it was meant to compile in the background as a language server so it was designed around thatMojo... I have things I could say... But I'll stick to this. I talked to engineers there and I asked one how they expected any python developers to use the planned borrow checker. The engineer said "Don't worry about it" ie they didn't have a plan. The nicest thing I can say is they didn't bullshit me 100% of the time when I directly asked a question privately. That's the only nice or neutral thing I could say
> LLVM: Pretty much everyone who has created a programming language with it has complained about its design. gingerbill, Jon Blow, and Andrew Kelley have all complained about it. LLVM is a good idea, but it that idea was executed better by Ken Thompson with his C compiler for Plan 9, and then again with his Go compiler design. Ken decided to create his own "architecture agnostic" assembly, which is very similar to the IR idea with LLVM.
I suggest you ask around to see what the consensus is for which compiler is actually mature. Hint: for all its warts, nobody is writing a seriously optimized language in any of the options you listed besides LLVM.
How many languages are using LLVM as its backend vs Go's?
As far as I know, only Go uses Go's back end because it was specifically designed for Go. But the architecture is such that it makes it trivial for Go to cross compile for any OS and architecture. This is something that LLVM cannot do. You have to compile a new compiler for every OS and arch combo you wish to compile to.
You could imagine creating a modified Go assembler that is more generic and not tied to Go's ABI that could accomplish the same effect as LLVM. However, it'd probably be better to create a project like that from scratch, because most of Go's optimizations happen before reaching the assembler stage.
It would probably be best to have the intermediate language that QBE has and transform that into "intermediate assembly" (IA) very similar to Go's assembly. That way the IL stage could contain nearly all the optimization passes, and the IA stage would focus on code generation that would translate to any OS/arch combo.
> As far as I know, only Go uses Go's back end because it was specifically designed for Go. But the architecture is such that it makes it trivial for Go to cross compile for any OS and architecture. This is something that LLVM cannot do. You have to compile a new compiler for every OS and arch combo you wish to compile to.
I don't think that's true. Zig have a cross-compiler (that also compiles C and C++) based on LLVM. I believe LLVM (unlike gcc) is inherently a cross-compiler, and it's mostly just shipping header files for every platform that `zig cc` is adding.
I do not have enough knowledge to say anything bad about LLVM. As an "amateur" compiler writer, it did confuse me a bit though.
What I will say is that it seem popular to start with LLVM and then move away from it. Zig is doign that. Rust is heading in the direction perhaps with Cranelift. It feels that, if LLVM had completely nailed its mission, these kinds of projects would be less common.
It is also notable that the Dragonegg project to bring GCC languages to LLVM died but we have multiple projects porting Rust to GCC.
Even Clang can cross-compile from one compiler binary - whats missing is bundling the "platform SDK" for all targets like Zig does.
Go never advertised, designed for, nor supported external usage of their backend.
Chris Lattner is definitely a genius engineer at innovation, implementation and delivery but long-term, robust, maintenable software-design doesn't appear to be in his capability set.
The latter is definitely a defining capability of Anders Hejlsberg. (C#/Typescript designer)
> Everything Chris Lattner has done has been a "successful mess".
I don't have an emotional reaction to this, i.e. I don't think you're being mean, but it is wrong and reductive, which people usually will concisely, and perhaps reductively, describe as "mean".
Why is it wrong?
LLVM is great.
Chris Lattner left Apple a *decade* ago, & thus has ~0 impact or responsibility on Swift interop with C++ today.
Swift is a fun language to write, hence, why they shoehorned it in, in the first place.
Mojo is fine, but I wouldn't really know how you or I would judge it. For me, I'm not super-opinionated on Python, and it doesn't diverge heavily from it afaik.
Not just LLVM, but Google's TPU seems to be doing fine also. Honestly it's an impressive track record.
He had 0 to do with the TPU.
I was hired around Google around the same time, but not nearly as famous :)
AFAICouldT it was a "hire first, figure out what to do later", and it ended up being Swift for TensorFlow. That went ~nowhere, and he left within 2 years.
That's fine and doesn't reflect on him, in general, that's Google for ya. At least that era of Google.
Ahh, thanks for the info. Yeah, I heard Google was a bit messy from colleagues who went there.
You don't explain or support your position, you are calling Lattner names. That's not helpful to me or anyone else if we are trying to evaluate his work. Swift has millions of users as does Mojo and Modular in general. These are not trivial accomplishments.
Mojo and Modular have millions of users?
You can answer that question yourself.
You're right, looks like they don't, in fact, have millions of users.
Sick burn my man. Hope you check out Mojo lang vs arguing about rounding errors. I’m still unclear why I’m supposed to steer clear of Lattner which was what we were discussing.
Not sure what you're even talking about. You said something I was curious about since I thought you knew something about it I didn't but then you told me to look it up myself, for some reason, and I did. I don't know how you construed that as a "sick burn" or that you're "supposed to steer clear of Lattner," both of which I never said or implied.
It is all not important and I'm moving on as I'm sure you are as well. I assume good faith so I'm thinking we talked past each other a bit plus I was grouchy at one point (I apologize).
Here's the nut from the relevant comment: "There's no way to say this without sounding mean: Everything Chris Lattner has done has been a "successful mess". He's obviously smart, but a horrible engineer. No one should allow him to design anything."
I can't support a take like this (the commenter's, not yours) it is not helpful or informative. That original comment was edited too, or added onto. On the face of it, the sentiment that Swift and Mojo and LLVM are these awful abominations is beyond the pale for me from an engineering standpoint. I think there are some FOSS feelings in play that stir up strongly held ideologies.
That's why there's nothing that comes close to LLVM and MLIR, right?
If he's such a horrible engineer then we should have lots of LLVM replacements, right?
QBE is a tiny project, but I think illustrates a better intermediate language design. https://c9x.me/compile/
Except performance isn't great and it covers far fewer platforms. It aims for 70% performance but the few benchmarks I've seen show more like 30-50% performance.
It's a cool project and I'd consider it for a toy language but it's far from an LLVM replacement.
Many compilers including my own uses C89
You'll still need a C compiler...
I never heard of hardware without one
Avoiding interacting with LLVM as a user doesn't mean you've created something equivalent to LLVM.
And if the C compiler you use is clang then you're still literally making use of LLVM.
I don't know what point you're trying to make but your question was what's an alternative to llvm. People writing compilers always used C89 or a version of it (C11 allows an easier atomic implementation). There's a lot more C89 compilers than backends that llvm supports. When I was writing arduino code clang/llvm couldn't generate the AVR code for the board. The default toolchain was gcc with an AVR backend. IIRC it had optimizations and was the only reasonable compiler I could use. There's nothing wrong using C as your backend
> There's nothing wrong using C as your backend
I didn't say there was. Saying use C instead of LLVM is fine for a language designer.
But that doesn't make it a replacement for LLVM as a piece of infrastructure. C compilers still need an optimizing backend like LLVM.
The conversation is about whether or not LLVM is a shit piece of engineering, not whether you should target C or IR as a language designer. Avoiding using LLVM directly isn't a replacement lol.
You could say "GCC" is a replacement which at least isn't completely false, but GCC's backend is far more annoying to use for different languages.
You don't really need to deal with gcc backend. Most languages are expressible in C89. It'll obviously be less readable since generated lines look nothing like source lines but C89 beats llvm in most cases, especially if the C compiler supports assembly. I stuck to using intrinsics only because I heard of compilers producing worse code when it hits asm blocks since it can't understand it as well as intrinsics. I took out llvm last time it broke my compiler because it didn't add any value
IIRC, the Inmos Transputer shipped without a C compiler, and while third party products (including a port of GCC) did come later, it was Occam-only for quite some time.
So what you're saying is that C source code is the (only) stable LLVM ABI ;)
Haha, yes
Hard to feel excited for this project when it feels so handwavey and when basic technical decisions have never been nailed down.
What are other projects trying something similar that deserve attention?
What projects are trying something similar to Ladybird? Well, mobody really. But Servo is pretty close though they are not writing their own Javascript engine or anything.
But you should perhaps give your attention to Servo. They were founded as a project to write a modern browser in Rust. So, no hand-waving there.
No hand-waving on the Ladybird team either in my opinion. They have very strong technical leadership. The idea that building a massive application designed to process untrusted user input at scale might need a better language than C++ seems like a pretty solid technical suggestion. Making incedible progress month after month using the language you started with seems pretty good too. And deciding, given the progress buidling and the lack of progress exploring the new language, that perhaps it would be best to formally abandon the idea of a language switch...well, that seems like a pretty solid decision as well.
At least, that is my view.
Oh, and I was a massive Servo fan before the Ladybird project even began. But, given how much further Ladybird has gotten than Servo has, despite being at it for less time and taking on a larger scope...well, I am giving my attention to Ladybird these days.
This comment was written in Ladybird.
> when it feels so handwavey
Carefully making decisions and then reassessing those choices later on when they prove to be problematic is the opposite of handwavey...