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by rvz 119 days ago
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.
6 comments
tomjakubowski 119 days ago
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.

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josephg 119 days 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.

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satvikpendem 119 days ago
Servo was essentially integrated into Firefox. It was not a browser in itself until it was put into a foundation on its own.
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cztomsik 119 days ago
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?

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tvshtr 119 days ago
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.
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bigyabai 119 days ago
> Fil-C likely can do the job

> Job done.

Seems like you forgot a few stops in your train of thought, Speed Racer.

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johnofthesea 115 days ago
This comment needs another 'EDIT'.
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