Andreas Kling aka @awesomekling wrote:
We’ve been evaluating a number of C++ successor languages for @ladybirdbrowser , and the one best suited to our needs appears to be @SwiftLang 🪶
Over the last few months, I’ve asked a bunch of folks to pick some little part of our project and try rewriting it in the different languages we were evaluating. The feedback was very clear: everyone preferred Swift!
Why do we like Swift?
First off, Swift has both memory & data race safety (as of v6). It’s also a modern language with solid ergonomics.
Something that matters to us a lot is OO. Web specs & browser internals tend to be highly object-oriented, and life is easier when you can model specs closely in your code. Swift has first-class OO support, in many ways even nicer than C++.
The Swift team is also investing heavily in C++ interop, which means there’s a real path to incremental adoption, not just gigantic rewrites.
Strong ties to Apple?
Swift has historically been strongly tied to Apple and their platforms, but in the last year, there’s been a push for “swiftlang” to become more independent. (It’s now in a separate GitHub org, no longer in “apple”, for example).
Support for non-Apple platforms is also improving, as is the support for other, LSP-based development environments.
What happens next?
We aren’t able to start using it just yet, as the current release of Swift ships with a version of Clang that’s too old to grok our existing C++ codebase. But when Swift 6 comes out of beta this fall, we will begin using it!
No language is perfect, and there are a lot of things here that we don’t know yet. I’m not aware of anyone doing browser engine stuff in Swift before, so we’ll probably end up with feedback for the Swift team as well.
I’m super excited about this! We must steer Ladybird towards memory safety, and the first step is selecting a successor language that we can begin adopting very soon. 🤓🐞
Now THAT was unexpected.
This seems like such a poor choice if you want a cross platform browser.
Probably to be a cross platform wide-adopted browser is not the goal, and the author hopes to find a niche userbase amongst conservative macOS users to feed his narcissism.
What?
I mean this sincerely, I’ve been loosely following this project and the OS it is from and would like to know more about what you know, because this is the first time I’ve heard such accusations.
It’s a reference to this: https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/pull/6814#issuecomment-830793992
They have a phobia of making changes that are valid if they perceive the change to be motivated by politics. In the example above, the PR is denied because they have been convinced that the PR is about accommodating trans people. The existence of trans people and accommodating them via grammar is political for certain kinds of conservatives. The irony is that their own political beliefs are affecting their ability to distinguish a valid change from a politically-motivated one.
I’ve worked with Swift a bunch for Apple platforms, am mildly familiar with how it works on other platforms. It should be able to compile on a wide host of platforms with minimal/no issues. The runtime dependencies are localized to Apple platforms, and I think the dominant UI toolkit on other platforms is a Swift port of qt. So it should be just fine?
Not necessarily. The language itself is implemented on LLVM and compiles to a variety of backends, and can interoperate with C and C++ (including presenting C++ classes and STL types in its type system). Toolchains exist for Windows and Linux, as well as Apple platforms, and porting them to other POSIX-like OSes shouldn’t be too hard. The core of the language and its Foundation runtime library are open-source and cross-platform; it’s only macOS/iOS APIs and higher-level frameworks built on them like SwiftUI which are proprietary. Swift is in use on non-Apple platforms: there’s the Kitura web framework, which gets deployed mostly on Linux, and someone has recently used it to write games for the PlayDate handheld console.
In general, I can’t fault his rationale there. Swift has more modern language features (such as an expressive type system) than Go, is not quite as fiddly as Rust, isn’t a trainwreck of incompatible levels of abstraction like C++, and has developer momentum behind it unlike Dart.
Reading that really makes me want to give it a go. If swift’s package management is anything like Rust or Go, I could see myself enjoying it
Hey Ladybird — get off Xitter and use something else like Mastadon.
Weird fascist tech bro
What the hell are you talking about? I have been following Andreas for few years already and in no way he is fascist, in fact he is one of the most wholesome people around that I know of.
Your comment convinced me to finally take a look at his profile and see what the fuss is about.
I didn’t see anything that’d make me scream fascism, either.
But there’s definitely stuff that’s off. Things that, in isolation, would be one thing, but when you analyze them all together, it wouldn’t be weird to say there’s a pattern. A picture starts to form, and it’s one that I’ve sadly seen many times before.
So I went back and grabbed a few tweets:
- Andreas’ take on… political leanings of contributors?
- Spoiler: he thinks the left doesn’t contribute, apparently, and I have no idea how he measured lurkers.
- Andreas is, according to himself, something like a centrist?
- What does he consider a “purity test” from either side?
- See this measurement of his political leanings. Rest assured, he shared it in jest.
- Did you know the internet makes fun of these tests because it only takes a few progressive choices to throw you so far left, you’d think only through decidedly unwholesome picks it’d be possible to hit the right side?
- Andreas believes Twitter is full of positive energy.
- I thought this was funny, because everyone I know—especially Twitter users—claim it’s become a far-right infested cesspit.
- Andreas’ neutral take and isolated opinion on pronouns in the office
- The most liked reply: “[…] a red flag indicating that it is a woke workplace. […]” Many such followers. This is his bubble. Very positive.
- Andreas’ reaction to someone who didn’t like what they saw in a GH issue.
- Multiple times now, when this issue was mentioned, I’ve seen people bring up how old it is. The age is irrelevant if he clearly still thinks the same. I stand by Lea’s arguments here, and seeing him double down and fail to understand the problem is worrying.
I barely had to scroll to find these, they’re all recent. There’s much more.
Individually, you could dismiss everything. It’s just humor. He’s neutral. Objective. Wholesome. But then, why does he keep hitting the same keys? You’d assume a wholesome centrist would have a little more variety in their stand-up routine.
You know what he reminds me of, after reading so many of his tweets?
People who dress up in a veneer of positivity, but you ask them what they think is negative, and they’ll say things like raising awareness of LGBT issues. Not in those words, of course, because that’s not positive. When they talk about it, they’ll put on this show about how they don’t take sides, and how they’re simply worried about the technical discussion, the actually important stuff, you know? They simply don’t like unhelpful noise, things like trying to foster an inclusive community.
It’s easy to seem like a positive figure when you never properly acknowledge any criticism. Position yourself as a factual, neutral voice of objectivity, even when that’s literally impossible. Paint those who disagree as non-contributing, unproductive, negative noise-makers. Say you agree with people on topics they care about, but then turn around and tell them they’re all doing it wrong. Cover it all up in emoji and a “Let’s do it together!” attitude, but reject anyone who reaches out with the wrong greeting.
And there you have it, Andreas reads like a man who’s either lying to himself or to others, and I don’t know which is worse.
I went into this thinking, “I have to avoid baselessly criticizing people. There’s surely nuance to this man’s real beliefs, people on the internet are too quick to attack without evidence.” Which is why I’m honestly surprised to say that I came out with a mildly worse opinion of Andreas than when I started. What the hell.
I sincerely hope he can reflect on his behavior and grow out of this strange mindset. Andreas seems to be a great software developer and Ladybird can be an enormous boon for the web, so it hurts to see him acting this way.
Again, I genuinely don’t think he’s on Twitter because he’s a “weird fascist tech bro” who likes a fascist platform (what is even meant by weird?). I find it more probable that he’s comfortable there, realizes that it’s not going anywhere, that it remains the most popular platform, and therefore doesn’t think Mastodon is worth the effort.
Why he’s so comfortable there and doesn’t like Mastodon is worth thinking about, though.
Programming language: Swift - owned by big corp
Source forge: Github - owned by big corp
Communication channels:
- Xitter - owned by big corp
- Discord - proprietary and non-searchable
👌
They probably wanted to use Rust but got frustrated by its struct and impl paradigm.
Swift was developed by a lot of former C++ committee members, and in C++ circles they’ve been advocating for it as a “successor language” for quite some time.
This could definitely be confusing if you don’t have that context, but making Swift useful for this kind of project has been an explicit goal of the Swift developers for years.
How have they been advocating that? This is the first I’m hearing about any of this…
Through talks at C++ conferences and appearances on C++ podcasts:
https://youtu.be/lgivCGdmFrw?feature=shared
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/cppcast/id968703120?i=1000663536368
Is Swift really safe?
IDK, but D is probably a better “successor language” for C++ than Swift. The lack of corporate support is both a curse and a blessing: What it lacks in money makes up in no “hype-bust” cycles, thus we don’t have to jump on various bandwagons and programming trends can be easier written off as just trends (e.g. we dodged a bullet by never going through a “const by default” suggestion).
