I wonder what kind of tech debt this brings and if the trade off will be worth whatever problems they were having with C++.
I would say modern c++ written by someone already familiar with rust will probably be structured in a way that's extremely easy to port because you end up modeling the borrow checker in your brain.
The problem was strictly how cpp is perceived as an unsafe language, and this problem rust does solve! Not being sarcastic, this truly looks like a mature take. Like, we don't know if moving to rust would improve quality or prevent vulnerabilities, here's our best effort to find out and ignore if the claim has merits for now. If the claim maintains, well, you're better prepared, if it doesn't, but the code holds similar qualities...what is the downside?
Why was there ever any expectation for Swift having good platform support outside Apple? This should have been (and was to me) already obvious when they originally announced moving to Swift.
Apple puts zero resources into making that claim reality, however.
But in the end I can't help but feel Swift has become an absolute beast of a multi-paradigm language with even worse compile times than Rust or C++ for dubious ergonomics gains.
Does it make sense compared to C#, Go, Rust or a JVM language? I don't know, but it's there, and Apple put some resources behind the initiative.
Have you actually used .NET on Linux/macOS? I have (both at home and work) and there isn't anything that made me think it was neglected on those platforms. Everything just works™
they learn Rust
it takes a couple of years
it's not that hard.
The real question is what this does to migrations that never happened because 18 months of rewrite did not pencil out. A 2-week port fundamentally changes that calculus.
Personally, I can’t get meaningful results unless I use the tool in a true pair-programming mode—watching it reason, plan, and execute step by step. The ability to clearly articulate exactly what you want, and how you want it done, is becoming a rare skill.
> Ralph Wiggum loop
https://github.com/anthropics/claude-plugins-official/pull/1...
They're not porting the browser itself to Rust, for the record.
Don't forget that the Rust ecosystem around browsers is growing, Firefox already uses it for their CSS engine[0], AFAIK Chrome JPEG XL implementation is written in Rust.
So I don't see how this could be seen as a negative move, I don't think sharing libraries in C++ is as easy as in Rust.
“the Rust ecosystem around browsers is growing” – in the beginning pretty much 100% of the ecosystem around Rust was browser oriented
Thankfully Servo is picking up speed again and is a great project to help support with some donations etc: https://servo.org/
Seems like a lot of language switches in a short time frame. That'd make me super nervous working on such a project. There will be rough parts for every language and deciding seemingly on whims that 1 isn't good enough will burn a lot of time and resources.
There is an open PR (by simonw btw): https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented/pull/4...
> classic HackerNews title shortening algorithm
Adding the "with help from AI" almost always devolves the discussion from that to "developers must adopt AI or else!" on the one hand and "society is being destroyed by slop!" on the other, so as long as that's not happening I'm not complaining about the editorialized title.
I use AI more and more. Goes like create me classes A,B,C with such and such descriptive names, take this state machine / flowchart description to understand the flow and use this particular sets of helpers declared in modules XYZ
I then test the code and then go over and look at any un-optimal and other patterns I prefer not to have and asking to change those.
After couple of iterations code usually shines. I also cross check final results against various LLMs just in case
Ladybird is much further ahead in terms of actually rendering web pages that people use.
The biggest advantage to Servo was that it is written in Rust. This move begins to nullify that advantage as well.
Why exactly does Servo make more sense?
I hope they both succeed. But Ladybird is more likely to become a usable browser first.
But Rust doesn't have C++ interop at all?
Firefox is a mixed C++ / Rust codebase with a relatively close coupling between Rust and C++ components in places (layout/dom/script are in C++ while style is in Rust, and a mix of WebRender (Rust) and Skia (C++) are used for rendering with C++ glue code)
Yeah but, you can do the same in Swift
The Rust compiler is incredibly solid (across all target platforms), and while it's C/C++ interop is relatively simplistic, what does exist is extensively battle tested in production codebases.
It also doesn't have the disadvantages of Swift. Once the promise of Swift/C++ interop is gone there isn't enough left to recommend it.
for example: "Swift fails to import clang modules with #include <math.h> with libstdc++-15 installed. Workaround: None (!!)"
[1]: https://www.swift.org/documentation/cxx-interop/
[2]: https://www.swift.org/blog/improving-usability-of-c-librarie...
Firefox solves this partly by not using `std` types.
For example, https://github.com/mozilla/thin-vec exists in large part because it's compatible with Firefox's existing C++ Vec/Array implementation (with the bonus that it's only 8 bytes on the stack compared to 24 for the std Vec).