Its purpose is not to reinvent everything. It’s not a hype project.
they learn Rust
it takes a couple of years
it's not that hard.
I don't think this is the right response because certainly a meaningful discussion could've definitely taken place and given how they were already open to other languages which was the reason why they picked Swift in the first place.
I remember Andreas video where he talked about how people used rust in his codebase and they were so happy but later it became very difficult whereas they found with swift that it became easier to manage. That was the reason why they picked swift that time.
Certainly their goal wasn't to pick a popular language (because if that's what you want use python or JS) but rather a language that was relevant to what they were building.
So if D and Ada were relevant or not, that's the main point of discussion imo.
However, this is where d shines. D has a mature ecosystem. Offers first class cpp abi and provides memory safety guarantees, which the blog mentioned as a primary factor. And d is similar to cpp, low barrier for cpp devs to pick up.
But what I wanted to know was about evaluation with other languages, because Andreas has written complex software.
His insight might become enriching as to shortcomings or other issues which developers not that high up in the chain, may not have encountered.
Ultimately, that will only help others to understand how to write better software or think about scalability.
I agree that, this might be wrong behaviour and I don't think its any fault of rust itself which itself could be a blanket statement imo. There's nuance in both sides of discussions.
Coming to the main point, I feel like the real reason could be that rust is this sort of equilibra that the world has reached for, especially security related projects. Whether good or bad, this means that using rust would definitely lead to more contributor resources and the zeal of rustaceans can definitely be used as well and also third party libraries developed in rust although that itself is becoming a problem nowadays from what I hear from people in here who use rust sometimes (ie. too many dependencies)
Rust does seem to be good enough for this use case. I think the question could be on what D/Ada (Might I also add Nim/V/Odin) will add further to the project but I honestly agree that a fruitful discussion b/w other languages would've been certainly beneficial to the project (imo) and at the very least would've been very interesting to read personally
This completely misses the purpose of the downvoting feature, which is not surprising, since upvoting seems no longer to indicate quality or truth of the comment neither.
> rust is this sort of equilibra that the world has reached for, especially security related projects
Which is amazing, since Rust only covers a fraction of safety/security concerns covered by Ada/SPARK. Of course this language has some legacy issues (e.g. the physical separation of interface and body in two separate files; we have better solutions today), but it is still in development and more robust than the C/C++ (and likely Rust) toolchain. And in the age of LLMs, robustness and features of a toolchain should matter more than the language syntax/semantics.
> Rust does seem to be good enough for this use case.
If you compare it to the very recend C++ implementations they are using, I tend to agree. But if you compare it to a much more mature technology like e.g. Ada, I have my doubts.
I agree with you in the sense that it would've definitely been interesting to read what Andreas thinks of Ada/D and the discussion surrounding it and your overall comment too.
I do wish that anyone from ladybird team/maybe even Andreas if he's on HN (not sure) could respond to the original query if possible.
I remember ladybird had a discord server I once joined, perhaps someone from the community could ask Andreas about it there if possible since It would be genuinely fascinating to read.
Although a point I am worried about is if Ladybird changes the language again let's say after a discussion of using Ada/D. It might be awkward.
In the time of good LLMs this is likely no longer a show-stopper (as e.g. the specific formating rules in C/C++ since there are good re-formating tools). The question is how long we will need programming languages at all. They were primarily invented because large assembler projects were too challenging for most people. But if all the complicated details can now be delegated to LLMs, strictly speaking, we no longer need programming languages either.
"Downvote for disagree" has been canonicalized on HN since (nearly) the beginning, by pg himself, back when he used his real-name account to comment. :)
I agree that it has undesirable consequences, but it is fully established.
The article fails to explain why. What problems (besides the obvious) have been found in which "memory-safe languages" can help. Do these problems actually explain the need of adding complexity to a project like this by adding another language?
I guess AI will be involved which, at this early point in the project would make ladybird a lot less interested (at least to me).
Why isn't that enough?
Well, what else is there besides the obvious? It's a browser.
While rust is nice on paper, writting complex software in it is mentally consuming. You can not do it for a long time.