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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 ha
by meisel 7mo ago
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.
- mlinksva 7mo agohttps://x.com/awesomekling/status/1822236888188498031 https://x.com/awesomekling/status/1822236888188498031 https://x.com/awesomekling/status/1822239138038382684 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."
- refulgentis 7mo ago> 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.
- zozbot234 7mo agoRust 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.)
- rvz 7mo agoI 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.
- tvshtr 7mo agoThe 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.
- josephg 7mo ago> 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.
- tomjakubowski 7mo agoUntil 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.
- satvikpendem 7mo agoServo was essentially integrated into Firefox. It was not a browser in itself until it was put into a foundation on its own.
- cztomsik 7mo agoOnly 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?
- bigyabai 7mo ago
- 9rx 7mo ago> 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).
- zozbot234 7mo agoYou just need to define a trait, then you can use dynamic dispatch.
- 9rx 7mo agoYou 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.
- anonymars 7mo agoI 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!")
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- f33d5173 7mo agoThey 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.
- ckcheng 7mo ago> In the end it came down to Swift vs Rust, and Swift is strictly better in OO support and C++ interop Why not D?
- throwaway27448 7mo agoWhy not rust? It's popilar, in wide adoption, with wide support, without the baggage of C++. What'e the downside?
- user205738 7mo agoIt is not backward compatible, the library system is immature, and there is no variety of different compilers for the language.
- throwaway27448 7mo ago> the library system is immature Hoo boy, wait until you hear about the state of C++'s library "system"
- ckcheng 7mo agoWell 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.
- archargelod 7mo agoDid they consider using Nim? It has great C++ interop, OO and same ARC memory management as in Swift.
- lukeh 7mo agoSwift 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/ https://www.swift.org/documentation/cxx-interop/
- palata 7mo agoI 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.
- gmueckl 7mo agoBinding 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.
- palata 7mo agoYeah, 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.
- zadikian 7mo agoI 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.
- palata 7mo agoYes 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.
- bergheim 7mo agoI 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?
- rvz 7mo agoThis experiment has shown that both are actually bad choices.
- josephg 7mo agoOh? 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.
- zadikian 7mo agoIt 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.
- antonvs 7mo agoWhat OO features are you thinking of that Rust doesn't have? Traits give you the ability to model typical GUI OO hierarchies, e.g.: trait Widget { fn layout(&mut self, constraints: Constraints); fn paint(&self, ctx: &mut PaintCtx); fn handle_event(&mut self, event: Event); } struct Button { ... } struct Label { ... } impl Widget for Button { ... } impl Widget for Label { ... } let mut widgets: Vec<Box<dyn Widget>> = Vec::new(); 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.
- carefree-bob 7mo agoThe ladybird developers tried Rust and Swift both and voted to adopt Swift.
- password4321 7mo agoIt 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41208836 Ladybird browser to start using Swift language this fall
- jll29 7mo agoAndreas 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.
- stingraycharles 7mo agoBut wasn’t Rust designed specifically for being a language for developing a rendering engine / web browser?
- greazy 7mo agoNo. It was developed as a general purpose language. I think you are conflating the development of Servo with the design and development of Rust.
- diath 7mo agoRust 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.
- hollerith 7mo agoHow could browsers not be on his mind when his job was to contribute to Firefox as a dev?
- diath 7mo agoDo 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".
- 7mo ago
- elcritch 7mo agoAlso I believe one of the core LadyBird devs was an ex Apple employee on WebKit which has been using Swift as well.
- diath 7mo ago> 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.
- gardaani 7mo agoHere'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 https://x.com/awesomekling/status/1822241531501162806
- alper 7mo agoI 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.).
- sparky4pro 7mo agoSwift != GC
- ozgrakkurt 7mo agoI remember watching the project lead say something like “the developers just don’t enjoy rust”
- generalpf 7mo agoSwift doesn't use a garbage collector.
- myko 7mo agoARC is GC, Swift definitely uses GC. It isn't a _tracing_ GC