[echelon]

Servo's value is that it's written in Rust.

Ladybird is C++ and that still has the same issues as every other engine.

I suspect Ladybird will/has already leapfrogged Servo in performance and usage due to the Ladybird team and its momentum. Mozilla isn't doing anything with Servo anymore.

But I also don't really see a compelling reason for Ladybird's existence - we already have Chromium, Blink, Gecko, etc. It's hard for me to imagine a world where Ladybird is a healthy contender for marketshare.

The only real novel thing to do in this space is "rewrite it in Rust".

[nicoburns]

> The only real novel thing to do in this space is "rewrite it in Rust".

Ironically Chromium is now starting to include quite a bit of Rust. And of course Firefox has for some time.

[mnmalst]

They are planning to use swift in the future. Last point: https://ladybird.org/#faq

[heavyset_go]

I think that was being blocked by Swift features/libraries not being consistent across platforms, in that Swift for Linux/etc is missing stuff you'd get in macOS.

I don't see that changing any time soon. If Apple truly wanted Swift adoption to be cross platform, they have the resources to do it, but they didn't do it.

[stephen_g]

No, pretty sure that's all basically fixed in Swift 6 (Sep 2024), I think it's more just the immaturity of the C++ interop in being able to bridge Swift to complex C++ code.

That's a key feature of what Apple want Swift for (to gradually replace their C++ projects with Swift) but it's still pretty new. It'll take a while to mature.

[echelon]

That feels like the wrong language to bet the farm on.

Swift is horrible to develop in cross-platform. The language ergonomics are great, but the support just isn't there.

Also - swift is great for lots of applications, but a browser? Why use a garbage collected language for something that needs to be smooth? Unpredictable GC pause jitter is not something you want when smooth scrolling and rendering. Granted Javascript already negates that experience a little bit, but why introduce even more unpredictability?

I get the feeling the leadership loves Mac/Apple, which makes sense in light of their recent iOS announcement. Maybe they're prioritizing that world.

[niutech]

I've compared Servo with Ladybird and the latter uses 3x more RAM for the same website: https://fosstodon.org/@niutech/114139305720083599

So Servo is more lightweight than Ladybird.

[oblio]

Aren't Chromium and Blink basically the same thing? And Gecko isn't embeddable.

[heavyset_go]

> And Gecko isn't embeddable.

This is "In Review"[1], whatever that means.

[1] https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/ability-to-embed-gecko-...

[oblio]

Mozilla has been working on embedding Gecko since 2005. In practical terms, it can't be done.

I'd be glad to be proven wrong.

[niutech]

There are: GeckoView and Gecko Embedded, so it's doable.

[oblio]

Which roughly nobody uses.

[niutech]

But it's doable.

[tristan957]

Blink is the backing engine of Chromium.

[oblio]

And therefore Chromium isn't a browser engine and shouldn't be listed there.