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Comment by losvedir | Hacker News Reader

I was pretty excited about this, but didn't the Serenity browser recently announce they're going with Swift? That kind of takes the wind out of this language's sails.

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Yeah they've chosen Swift as their C++ successor language for Ladybird (the browser project forked from SerenityOS's browser)

Some work to do with making Swift work with ladybird's garbage collection but my understanding that this work is in progress.

Andreas talks about it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1Eq0xlVs3g&t=759s

Hell of a decision.

They came to it through a pretty pragmatic process. They made a list of candidate languages (they haven't discussed what the list was beyond "all the obvious candidates were represented") and assigned existing parts of the codebase to a few engineers asking them to reimplement the feature in the candidate languages. The team found they enjoyed working with Swift the most, and Swift's good support for OOP fit the object model of a web browser very well.

This doesn't imply the decision is any less jaw-dropping.

Besides, polling enjoyment is not exactly what I would describe as a pragmatic approach.

I think they had two overarching criteria:

1 - memory safe (ish)

2 - OOP

Rust was off the table because of number 2. The list gets short after that.

Rust has all the OOP features minus class inheritance, but folks like to repeat otherwise.

All the COM programming patterns can be easily done in Rust.

Here, ray tracing in one weekend, quite closely translated from the original C++ OOP design into Rust.

https://github.com/pjmlp/RaytracingWeekend-Rust

It has to work with the existing C++ code and class hierarchy. And OOP-like API is not good enough. It was not my assessment though. It was theirs.

Sure but that is already another criteria set, similar to how Carbon is also being developed, and not a plain "doesn't do OOP", because Java OOP is not the only flavour in town, which many folks conflate OOP with.

Not only does it predate the language by a few decades, there is enough type systems variants to chose from.

I mean that excludes swift too, it can't use the C++ ABI any more than other languages can. Excepting super-specialty languages

I haven't worked with it myself but my understanding is that Swift's C++ interop has improved a lot recently and is continuing to be improved. Apple has a huge C++ codebase so they are incentivized to make Swift work well with it

https://www.swift.org/documentation/cxx-interop/

The C++ interop story for Swift isn't the most clear cut, though. You're forced to use Apple's fork of llvm (meaning no GNU or mainline clang support) and there are issues tracking the current blockers[0]. Along with other related issues under the "swift" tag[1]. I don't think this was necessarily a bad technical decision, but from a lock-in and practicality perspective it seems flawed.

[0]: https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird/issues/933

[1]: https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird/issues?q=is%3Ais...

polling enjoyment is superbly pragmatic! this is a volunteer project that depends critically on the developers continuing to enjoy working on it. once you get past the first cut of "is this a reasonably mature language with a lot of community support behind it that compiles to fast native executables", enjoyment is one of the best ways you can choose between the various candidates. you can pretty much assume that rust/c++/swift/go/kotlin/etc all have the cross-platform support and libraries you will need.

Sure, if you're trying to have a good time it works great! No hate here.

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