I read the Ladybird FAQ for their rationale, but building a new browser in 2024 using an unsafe language is such a facepalm it’s hard to take the entire project seriously.
I read the Ladybird FAQ for their rationale, but building a new browser in 2024 using an unsafe language is such a facepalm it’s hard to take the entire project seriously.
While I enjoy the sentiment, it isn't as if Rust is doing any favours regarding Firefox adoption.
We've added tracking but at least it's safe(tm).
'unsafe language' sounds like something out of '1984' or 'Animal Farm'; a totalitarian political euphemism, attempting to demonize all 'others'.
The reality is that no language is actually 'safe', and 'safety' itself is a complex trade-off between enforced restrictions, flexibility, and other factors, just like in life.
Instead of "unsafe", we could use "computer verified correctness" or something similar. Truth is that humans make mistakes and Rust is the only "project" which achieves verified correctness in some critical areas, in projects of any complexity.
Developers gotta have religion. It's not about fear of death like mainstream churches, it's about fear of buffer overflows.
Developers already had a religion, the Church of Emacs. Heretics will not be tolerated.
'the rationale that they are actively evaluating other develoment platforms?
"However, now that Ladybird has forked and become its own independent project, all constraints previously imposed by SerenityOS are no longer in effect. We are actively evaluating a number of alternatives and will be adding a mature successor language to the project in the near future. This process is already quite far along, and prototypes exist in multiple languages."
They need to commit to not using C/C++ for the majority of the project.
If not, then yes it can’t be taken seriously.
Unlike existing browsers?
Existing browsers have an existing codebase to deal with.
Yup I don't understand the downvotes. I don't code in Rust but I also don't feel insecure about it: I wish more projects were written in Rust (or something similar).
There are several research, already published here many times, which show that something insane like 75%+ of all the security exploits would be rendered cold dead in their tracks had Rust been used.
I don't know how anyone, even a C/C++/VisualBasic/PHP coder, could not like that.
I suspect the downvotes are for a very simple reason: "Why not Rust?" comments are contributing next to nothing to the conversation. At this point, comments like this are tiresome and predictable.
What would be interesting are detailed separate posts such as what you mention about security exploits addressed and of course the stream of wonderful software that people are writing in Rust (and other languages as well for that matter). Bringing it up in relationship to Ladybird, which is an amazing accomplishment already, is incredibly petty and off-putting. The poster can do better and the community deserves better.
Unless I’m misreading, OP themselves didn’t actually say Rust at all. They just noted that Ladybird is written in an unsafe language.
I don’t read this as petty, it’s well noted by now that memory safe languages are increasingly recommended to avoid classes of errors.
You are correct about Rust not being mentioned explicitly, but I am yet to see a stream comments about memory safety coming out of say the Java, Python, Go, Haskell, etc. community. Then again, maybe I am wrong?
As for petty. "[B]uilding a new browser in 2024 using an unsafe language is such a facepalm it's hard to take the entire project seriously." sounds pretty darn petty and dismissive to me for a project that is making good progress. We desperately need diversity in terms of web browser implementations and "not taking seriously" a project which could very well become viable within the next few years solely based on their programming language of choice feels wrong to me (even as someone with next to no love for C++).