Not sure if you are trying to be funny, but if not: enlighten us?
Comment on Announcing the Ladybird Browser Initiative
miridius@lemmy.world 4 months ago
builds a new browser from scratch without borrowing existing code
still chooses to do it in C++
Epic fail
raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world 4 months ago
SorteKanin@feddit.dk 4 months ago
C++ is a very old, extremely complex language. There are arguably objectively better modern alternatives, such as Rust.
hexabs@lemmy.world 4 months ago
I agree that Rust is the way to go, but calling something “arguably” & “objectively” in the same breath is a bit of a paradox innit?
SorteKanin@feddit.dk 4 months ago
Well, it was more to recognize that there is no inherently better programming languages in theory, they all do the same stuff. And some languages are “better” at some stuff just due to the libraries available and nothing to do with the language itself. But yea I do think Rust is an objectively better language than C++.
phlegmy@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
Rust is great, but anybody developing something should have the ability to choose whatever programming language they prefer. If you want it made with rust, make it yourself.
Excrubulent@slrpnk.net 4 months ago
Not everyone with the knowledge to identify this mistake is in a position to personally correct it. Do you have the time and resources to personally build a browser from scratch? No? Why do you assume a random commenter does?
It doesn’t change the fact that Rust is similarly performant and much safer and will thus be faster to develop and less bug-prone. It’s not a difficult assessment to make. If you want to explain why they’re wrong you can talk about the issue on its merits, but you didn’t choose to, presumably because you can’t.
SorteKanin@feddit.dk 4 months ago
Of course, but it still makes sense to think carefully about the advantages of disadvantages of the tools you use when starting any project.
miridius@lemmy.world 4 months ago
If were just a personal project that they’re building entirely on their own then sure, go nuts and do whatever you want. But they’re trying to gain adoption, asking for contribution, and wanting to replace other browsers. At that point it’s no longer just a personal choice if you’re asking the community to invest their time and money into it with you
raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Taken from the wikipedia page on rust:
On February 8, 2021, the formation of the Rust Foundation was announced by its five founding companies (AWS, Huawei, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla).[36][37] In a blog post published on April 6, 2021, Google announced support for Rust within the Android Open Source Project as an alternative to C/C++.[38]
Four out of five founding companies are evil to the bone, with only Mozilla being somewhat reputable. That does not give me much confidence, sadly.
On November 22, 2021, the Moderation Team, which was responsible for enforcing community standards and the Code of Conduct, announced their resignation “in protest of the Core Team placing themselves unaccountable to anyone but themselves[39]”
How am I not surprised?
In May 2022, the Rust Core Team, other lead programmers, and certain members of the Rust Foundation board implemented governance reforms in response to the incident.[40]
At least that. However, I don’t care enough for the time being to spend my morning on reading what exactly they implemented.
SorteKanin@feddit.dk 4 months ago
The Rust Foundation very deliberately does not control the development of Rust. There has been issues with the moderation team in the past but I think they’re actually resolved today. And let me just assure you that Rust is not the only language project with problems and the fact that they have been talked about and discussed in the open and resolved is a sign of maturity and trust, not a bad thing.
miridius@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Sure :)
There are a lot of downsides of C++ compared to more modern languages that make it not a great choice if you’re starting a web browser from scratch
- Complexity of the language leading to increased bugs and slower development
- Manual memory management is error-prone and leads to issues like memory leaks or segmentation faults. Modern browsers need to handle large amounts of dynamic content, making memory management complicated
- C++ lacks some of the built-in safety features of more modern languages, which has led to the majority of security vulnerabilities found in major browsers. It’s so bad that Mozilla invented an entirely new programming language just to deal with this
- Compared to higher-level languages, C++ can be slower to develop in, which may impact the ability to quickly implement new web standards or features unless you have a massive team
- While C++ is cross-platform, ensuring consistent behavior across different operating systems can be more challenging than with some other languages.
- Newer languages often provide built-in support for concurrent programming, garbage collection, and other features useful for browser development, which C++ lacks.
So tl;dr: a browser but in C++ will take much longer to develop, have fewer features, more bugs, less concurrency and and more security vulnerabilities
raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Thanks for laying out your concerns. As a C++ developer who does not know the other languages you speak of (I assume Rust, Go), I can agree to some of your points, but also some of them I see differently:
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C++ can be complex, because it has a lot of features and especially the newer standards have brought some syntax that is hard to understand or read at times. However, those elements are not frequently used, or if they are, the developer will get used to them quickly & they won’t make development slow. As a matter of fact, most development time should be spent on thinking about algorithms, and thinking very well before implementing them - and until implementation, the language does not matter. I do not think that language complexity leads to increased bugs per se. My biggest project is just short of 40k lines of code, and most of the bugs I produced were the classical “off by one” or missing range checks, bugs that you can just as well produce in other languages.
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C++ no longer requires you to do manual memory management - that is what smart pointers are for, and RAII-programming.
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I can’t make a qualified comment on that, due to lack of expertise - you might be right.
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You’re somewhat repeating point 1) here with slow development. But you raise a good point: web standards have become insane in terms of quantity and interface sizes. Everyone and their dog wants to reinvent the wheel. That in itself requires a very large team to support I would say. As stated for point 1), I do not agree development in C++ has to be slower
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True, as someone who just suffered from problems introduced on windows (cygwin POSIX message queues implementation got broken by Win10, and inotify does not work on Windows Subsystem for Linux) I can confirm that while the C++ standard library is not much of a problem, the moment you interface with the host OS, you leave the standard realm and it becomes “zombieland”. Also, for some reason, the realtime library implementation on MacOS is different, breaking some very simple time-based functions. So yeah, that’s annoying to circumvent, but can be done by creating platform specific wrapper libraries that create a uniform API. For other languages, it appears this is done by the compilers, which is probably better - meaning the I/O operations got taken into those language’s core features
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I am highly doubtful of people relying on garbage collection - a programmer that doesn’t know exactly when his objects come into existence, and when they cease to exist is likely to make much bigger mistakes and produce very inefficient code. The aforementioned smart pointers in C++ solve this issue: object lifetime is the scope of the smart pointer declaration, and for shared pointers, object lifetime expires when the last process using it leaves the scope in which it is declared. For concurrent programming, I do not know if you mean concurrency (threads) or multiple people working on the same project. While multi-threading can be a bit “weird” at first, you have a lot of control over shared variables and memory barriers in C++ that might enable a team to produce a browser that is much faster, which I believe is a core requirement towards modern browsers
As for your tl;dr: definitely not “less concurrency”, that makes no sense. The other points may or may not be true, keeping in mind the answers I gave above.
miridius@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Appreciate you taking the time to reply in such detail! Some good insights thank you
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beeb@lemm.ee 4 months ago
Rust or bust
original2@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Then build a browser in rust…
Killing_Spark@feddit.de 4 months ago
Servo exists
ticho@lemmy.world 4 months ago
That’s a web rendering engine, not a web browser application. You need a lot of stuff other than the engine to make a browser.
Diabolo96@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 months ago
The dev has 30 years of experience with c++ and a lot of it was on browsers.
He tried to incorporate rust with the help of “JT”, one of the original rust designers/devs and it didn’t work that well due to the web being too objet oriented or something like that. They both worked together (well, mostly “JT”) to create a new safe programming language called “yakt” that transpile to c++, but the project is currently pretty much dead because nobody is really working on it anymore.
neclimdul@lemmy.world 4 months ago
The web being too object oriented for rust? Assuming that made sense, who wrote the dang language? If that’s true I’m even less confident they know what they’re doing then I was before.
Diabolo96@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 months ago
You’re doubting someone’s ability to create a web browser knowing that they specialize in browser development since early 2000s?
If this isn’t enough to have confidence in them then nothing will.
neclimdul@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Using my decades of experience in how programming and compilers works and the fact Mozilla has used it to great effect and how it is being used for parts of the Linux kernel… Yeah just a general statement it doesn’t make any sense.
Maybe they aren’t effective at designing software with the paradigms of the language or they don’t like it but the given explanation doesn’t track.
witx@lemmy.sdf.org 4 months ago
I’m not sure 10 years old are allowed on the internet. Isn’t it time for Coco and bed?
miridius@lemmy.world 4 months ago
there’s a reason
Oh good that settles it, no further questions your honour
miridius@lemmy.world 4 months ago
I wouldn’t go around accusing people of being 10 years old when your English skills are worse than a 10 year old’s. Glass houses and all that.
witx@lemmy.sdf.org 4 months ago
English is not my first language. I saw the mistake and left it here. You, mature as you are, fixated on that simple mistake instead of answering the main point
miridius@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Your main point was to throw childish insults around, so you got the same in return
ticho@lemmy.world 4 months ago
The language choice was because Ladybird started as a component of SerenityOS, which is also written in C++. With this separation, they are free to gradually introduce other language(s) into the codebase, and maybe eventually replace C++ entirely, piece by piece.
In Hackernews thread about this, the head maintainer mentioned that they have been evaluating several languages already, so we’ll see what the future brings.
In the meantime, let’s try to be mature about it, what do you say?