Lobsters.

We’ve been searching for a memory-safe programming language to replace C++ in Ladybird for a while now. We previously explored Swift, but the C++ interop never quite got there, and platform support outside the Apple ecosystem was limited. Rust is a different story. The ecosystem is far more mature for systems programming, and many of our contributors already know the language. Going forward, we are rewriting parts of Ladybird in Rust.

  • Matty_r@programming.dev
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    1 hour ago

    The worst part is they are doing themselves a disservice by not rewriting it by hand - have they really learnt enough Rust to know how to effectively rewrite the other parts of the engine as they say? Doubtful - they’ll probably just do everything through AI stuff going forward.

  • arcine@jlai.lu
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    2 hours ago

    I was enthusiastic about LadyBird until I learnt that the guy leading the project i s a white supremacist, via pivot-to-ai.

    Now I hope either someone else takes it over, or that it crashes and burns.

  • Fitik@fedia.io
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    1 hour ago

    Good riddance on ai, even if people there dislike it, ai-assisted code is already a norm in a lot of places. However, the decision seems confusing to me, there’s already a Rust based web engine (Servo), I’m confused about what’s the distinction between them now?

      • XLE@piefed.social
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        1 hour ago

        Based on the content of that article alone (especially near the bottom), I don’t think it’s run by a racist at all. Can confirm via their social media presence.

        • Fizz@lemmy.nz
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          30 minutes ago

          Weird. I would not feel comfortable using that domain. I thought i was reading a neo Nazis blog on the issue.

  • TheOneCurly@feddit.online
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    9 hours ago

    Yeah seems about right for this project. I really wanted this to be a serious browser, but nothing about this dude is serious.

    Also I know he backed this statement up with much better testing but these AI brainrot things people say kill me: “I ran multiple passes of adversarial review, asking different models to analyze the code for mistakes and bad patterns.”

  • cabbage@piefed.social
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    7 hours ago

    I would of course love to see ladybird succeed, but it has seemed problematic from the start in my opinion. Servo seems much more serious.

    I also like that Servo is developing an engine, not a browser as such. Seems like a good idea to keep the two separated.

  • tocano@piefed.social
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    8 hours ago

    I was enthusiastic about this project. But I am afraid these recent tangents will only reduce momentum.

  • Venia Silente@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    6 hours ago

    Every minute that passes, Gemini (not the Google one!) looks more viable, which is already a shame because as I described in lemm.ee before it went down, that itself feels like “Gopher but in the format of a brutalist buttplug”.

    What we need is some sort of return to HTML + CSS 1.0, or a web engine that simply ditches JS, so that development can be tackled by Individuals again.

    • vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org
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      3 hours ago

      Separation of server styles, server markup and client styles is definitely something Gemini lacks, not having server styles at all.

      But it’s not as much a problem of browsers as it is of the environment in which information is shared and propagated. While we still connect to websites using a browser, those websites will behave however their owners wish, inflating web standards and requiring complex browsers.

      I was dreaming of something like “hypertext Usenet”, and making descriptions of another system I was interested in trying to make, I am still not even close to that, and I’m not sure I’m still interested, because it appears NOSTR now has much of what I wanted in its standards.

      Basically if you imagine a system for propagating posts addressable by ids and with markup inside, referring to styles and containing hyperlinks by ids to other posts, you can throw away the idea of a website, and still have the hypertext web. That markup can be anything, while the URLs in the links leading to images and such (and other pages) are using those ids or are at least Blossom-compliant.

      I think NOSTR of new protocols is the one most likely to eventually attain such functionality. People here wouldn’t like it, I suppose, because of huge intersection with Bitcoin community and because most clients and client libraries are for the web. But there’s now a C client library, functional enough, and architecturally NOSTR is worlds above the thinking of designers of Lemmy, for example.

  • Dæmon S.@calckey.world
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    8 hours ago

    @[email protected] @[email protected]

    Ah, the smell of irony by the morning! Adopting a programming language often praised by its “safety”, while the entire pretension of “safety” is alchemically transmuted into a sewage and deliberately flushed up (not down) by a clanker who drinks from the cesspool with the same determination and thirst that of a Chevy Opala gurgling down entire Olympic pools worth of gasoline.

    Being serious now, the foreseeable future for Web browsing is definitely depressing: Chromium needs no introduction (used to be an interesting browser until Google’s mask “don’t be evil” fell and straightforwardly revealed their corporate face and farce), Firefox have been “welcoming the new AI overlords” for a while, text browsers (such as Lynx) are far from feasible for a CAPTCHA(and Anubis)-driven web… now, one of the latest and fewest glimmers of hope, an alternative Web browser engine, is becoming the very monster the fight against which was promised to be the launchpad purpose (“They who fights with monsters should be careful lest they thereby become a monster”). I wouldn’t be surprised if Servo were to enshittify, too. Being able to choose among the sameness is such a wonderful thing, isn’t it?

    I mean, I’m not the average Lemmy user who got this (understandably) deep hatred against AI, I am able to hold a nuanced view and finding quite interesting uses (especially when it comes to linguistics) for the clankers (especially the “open-weighted” ones). However, this, to shoving AI everywhere and using AI to “code for you”, it’s a whole different story. A software should be programmed in the way programming (as posited by Ada Lovelace) was intended to, not “vibe coded” by a fancy auto-completer who can’t (yet) deal with Turing completeness, especially when it comes to a whole miniature operational system that browsers became nowadays. When coding a whole OS, AI shouldn’t even be touched by a two million light-years pole, let alone by a two-feet pole.