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The post does not mention how much money they are giving. Maybe I am a pessimist, but unless the number is in tens of millions or hundreds of millions (very unl

by rs186 1y ago

The post does not mention how much money they are giving. Maybe I am a pessimist, but unless the number is in tens of millions or hundreds of millions (very unlikely), I don't think it helps the development of an independent browser very much. Google probably has poured over billions of dollars into Chrome development over the years, and if you look at what Chrome supports, it's massive. I seriously doubt anybody else can match their feature set, not to mention involvement in drafting the latest standards.

9cb14c1ec0 1y ago
Go look at what the Ladybird project has accomplished with much fewer resources. Ladybird will soon be as good as Firefox.
- tracker1 1y ago
  For relative definitions of "soon" and depending on the feature you use. I'd say it's probably 2 years or so away from being a real competitive option to FF/Chrome.
zarzavat 1y ago
LuaJIT was developed by one person. Ladybird doesn't need hundreds of millions of dollars, it needs interpreter specialists who are willing to lend their time to the project, and an army of volunteers to work on the rest of the rendering engine.
- nurbel 1y ago
  why do you think the js interpreter is that special compared to all the rest? AFAIU, CSS is a much more complex beast, as the spec has not been written to reflect the way it could be implemented
  - zarzavat 1y ago
    Writing JS JITs is a specialized skill that requires a deep knowledge of compilers, JavaScript, and CPU architectures. CSS is complicated but it's not as complex. It's just a matter of throwing enough sufficiently competent developers at the problem. Ladybird doesn't even have a JIT right now. They used to, but it got taken out because as best as I can tell, nobody on the project knows how to write one.
- troupo 1y ago
  So you want people to work for free on one of the most complex pieces of software in existence? Why wouldn't you want to give those people hundreds of millions of dollars? And if you think that writing a JS interpreter is the only hard part of a browser engine, have I got news for you.
  - zarzavat 1y ago
    My point was not that people/companies shouldn't donate money to the Ladybird project, but that an equally effective way of contributing is to contribute time, especially the time of developers with specialized skills that would otherwise be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars at market rates. Why should anyone work for free? Because they love the Web and hate Google's stranglehold over it.
    - troupo 1y ago
      > Why should anyone work for free? Because they love the Web and hate Google's stranglehold over it. Why would they work for free even given this? It's not something you hack on in an evening or two
- aeturnum 1y ago
  LuaJIT has ~85k lines of code. Chromium and Firefox have somewhere in the neighborhood of ~30 million. If you need ~1 developer for "a LuaJIT" then you need ~350 developers for a browser.
  - l___l 1y ago
    The assumption that a browser needs ~30 million lines of code may be false. It may be possible for a scripting language with at least the same features as LuaJIT to be as fast as LuaJIT in less than 85K lines of code.
robinhood 1y ago
Clearly you haven't been following what Ladybird's team have been doing in the last months. With almost no resources, they've created this web engine that is almost at par with the giants.
- fabrice_d 1y ago
  The "almost" is very load bearing there... It's not remotely competitive with blink/webkit/gecko yet, be it for features support or performance.
timeon 1y ago
If I understand it correctly, Ladybird uses Skia. So they are also benefiting from those "billions poured over Chrome".
lazylion2 1y ago
$100k https://x.com/ladybirdbrowser/status/1970160706650595592 https://x.com/ladybirdbrowser/status/1970160706650595592
- rs186 1y ago
  So that's like... almost nothing compared to what's needed for browser development.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]

by rs186 1y ago

9cb14c1ec0 1y ago

Go look at what the Ladybird project has accomplished with much fewer resources. Ladybird will soon be as good as Firefox.

tracker1 1y ago
For relative definitions of "soon" and depending on the feature you use. I'd say it's probably 2 years or so away from being a real competitive option to FF/Chrome.

zarzavat 1y ago

LuaJIT was developed by one person. Ladybird doesn't need hundreds of millions of dollars, it needs interpreter specialists who are willing to lend their time to the project, and an army of volunteers to work on the rest of the rendering engine.

nurbel 1y ago
why do you think the js interpreter is that special compared to all the rest? AFAIU, CSS is a much more complex beast, as the spec has not been written to reflect the way it could be implemented
- zarzavat 1y ago
  Writing JS JITs is a specialized skill that requires a deep knowledge of compilers, JavaScript, and CPU architectures. CSS is complicated but it's not as complex. It's just a matter of throwing enough sufficiently competent developers at the problem. Ladybird doesn't even have a JIT right now. They used to, but it got taken out because as best as I can tell, nobody on the project knows how to write one.
troupo 1y ago
So you want people to work for free on one of the most complex pieces of software in existence? Why wouldn't you want to give those people hundreds of millions of dollars? And if you think that writing a JS interpreter is the only hard part of a browser engine, have I got news for you.
- zarzavat 1y ago
  My point was not that people/companies shouldn't donate money to the Ladybird project, but that an equally effective way of contributing is to contribute time, especially the time of developers with specialized skills that would otherwise be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars at market rates. Why should anyone work for free? Because they love the Web and hate Google's stranglehold over it.
  - troupo 1y ago
    > Why should anyone work for free? Because they love the Web and hate Google's stranglehold over it. Why would they work for free even given this? It's not something you hack on in an evening or two
aeturnum 1y ago
LuaJIT has ~85k lines of code. Chromium and Firefox have somewhere in the neighborhood of ~30 million. If you need ~1 developer for "a LuaJIT" then you need ~350 developers for a browser.
- l___l 1y ago
  The assumption that a browser needs ~30 million lines of code may be false. It may be possible for a scripting language with at least the same features as LuaJIT to be as fast as LuaJIT in less than 85K lines of code.

robinhood 1y ago

Clearly you haven't been following what Ladybird's team have been doing in the last months. With almost no resources, they've created this web engine that is almost at par with the giants.

fabrice_d 1y ago
The "almost" is very load bearing there... It's not remotely competitive with blink/webkit/gecko yet, be it for features support or performance.

timeon 1y ago

If I understand it correctly, Ladybird uses Skia. So they are also benefiting from those "billions poured over Chrome".

lazylion2 1y ago

$100k https://x.com/ladybirdbrowser/status/1970160706650595592 https://x.com/ladybirdbrowser/status/1970160706650595592

rs186 1y ago
So that's like... almost nothing compared to what's needed for browser development.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]