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Lightpanda migrate DOM implementation to Zig

lightpanda.io

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Re: Lightpanda migrate DOM implementation to Zig

#41

Post by meheleventyone »

quotemstr wrote: post #14
fbouvier wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, I am Francis, founder of Lightpanda. We wrote a full article explaining why we choose Zig over Rust or C++, if you are interested: https://lightpanda.io/blog/posts/why-we-built-lightpanda-in-... Our goal is to build a headless browser, rather than a general purpose browser like Servo or Chrome. It's already available if you would like to try it: https://lightpanda.io/docs/open-source/installation

Choosing something like Zig over C++ on simplicity grounds is going to be a false economy. C++ features exist for a reason . The complexity is in the domain. You can't make a project simpler by using a simplistic language: the complexity asserts itself somehow, somewhere, and if a language can't express the concept you want, you'll end up with circumlocution "patterns" instead. Build system complexity disappears when…

> C++ features exist for a reason.

But sometimes not good ones. Lot's of domains make tradeoffs about what features of C++ to actually make use of. It's an old language with a lot of cruft being used across a wide set of problems that don't necessarily share engineering trade offs.

Re: Lightpanda migrate DOM implementation to Zig

#42

Post by Philpax »

quotemstr wrote: post #14
fbouvier wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, I am Francis, founder of Lightpanda. We wrote a full article explaining why we choose Zig over Rust or C++, if you are interested: https://lightpanda.io/blog/posts/why-we-built-lightpanda-in-... Our goal is to build a headless browser, rather than a general purpose browser like Servo or Chrome. It's already available if you would like to try it: https://lightpanda.io/docs/open-source/installation

Choosing something like Zig over C++ on simplicity grounds is going to be a false economy. C++ features exist for a reason . The complexity is in the domain. You can't make a project simpler by using a simplistic language: the complexity asserts itself somehow, somewhere, and if a language can't express the concept you want, you'll end up with circumlocution "patterns" instead. Build system complexity disappears when…

Your Swiss Army Knife with a myriad of 97 oddly-shaped tools may be able to do any job anyone could ask of it, but my Swiss Army Knife of 10 well-designed tools that are optimal for my set of tasks will get my job done with much less frustration.

Re: Lightpanda migrate DOM implementation to Zig

#43

Post by pjmlp »

pron wrote: post #29
barishnamazov wrote: post #2

This reminds me of the Servo project's journey. Always impressed to see another implementation of the WHATWG specs. It's interesting to see Zig being chosen here over Rust for a browser engine component. Rust has kind of become the default answer for "safe browser components" (e.g., Servo, Firefox's oxidation), primarily because the borrow checker maps so well to the ownership model of a DOM tree in theory. But in pr…

I don't think that a language that was meant to compete with C++ and in 10+ years hasn't captured 10% of C++'s (already diminished) market share could be said to have become "kind of the default" for anything (and certainly not when that requires generalising from n≅1).

It has for Amazon, Adobe, Microsoft, Google and the Linux kernel.

It remains to be seen which big name will make Zig unavoidable.

Re: Lightpanda migrate DOM implementation to Zig

#44

Post by Philpax »

kristopolous wrote: post #18

I've been using it for months now ever since I saw their presentation at GitHub This is a common flow for me lightpanda url | markitdown (microsoft) | sd (day50 streamdown) I even have it as a shell alias, wv(). It's way better than the crusty old lynx and links on sites that need JS. It's solid. Definitely worth a check

Oh, huh, being able to convert arbitrary websites that may use JS for rendering to Markdown could be very handy indeed. Thanks for the tip!

Re: Lightpanda migrate DOM implementation to Zig

#45

Post by pjmlp »

senko wrote: post #27
7bit wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> without fighting the compiler It's unfortunate that "writing safe code" is constantly being phrased in this way. The borrow checker is a deterministic safety net. Claiming Zig is easier ignores that its lack of safety checks is what makes it feel easier; if Zig had Rust’s guarantees, the complexity would be the same. Comparing them like this is apples vs. oranges.

The fact that Zig doesn't have Rust's guarantees doesn't mean Zig does not have safety checks. The safety checks that Zig does have are different , and are different in a way that's uniquely useful for this particular project. Zig's check absolutely don't go to the extent that Rust's do, which is kind of the point here. If you do need to go beyond safe code in Rust, Zig is safer than unsafe code in Rust. Saying Zig l…

Thing is, those safety checks are also available in C and C++, provided that one uses the right tools like PVS and PurifyPlus (just to quote two examples), and now ongoing AI based tooling efforts for verification, thus the question is why a language like Zig in the 21st century, other than "I don't like either C++ or Rust".

Re: Lightpanda migrate DOM implementation to Zig

#46

Post by Philpax »

lewdwig wrote: post #21

A language which is not 1.0, and has repeatedly changed its IO implementation in a non-backwards-compatible way is certainly a courageous choice for production code.

It's certainly not a choice I would have made, but there's sufficient precedent for it now (TigerBeetle, Ghostty, etc) that I can understand it.

Re: Lightpanda migrate DOM implementation to Zig

#47

Post by Ygg2 »

pron wrote: post #34
7bit wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> without fighting the compiler It's unfortunate that "writing safe code" is constantly being phrased in this way. The borrow checker is a deterministic safety net. Claiming Zig is easier ignores that its lack of safety checks is what makes it feel easier; if Zig had Rust’s guarantees, the complexity would be the same. Comparing them like this is apples vs. oranges.

That's a very narrow way of looking at things. ATS has a much stronger "deterministic safety net" than Rust, yet the reason to use Rust over ATS is that "fighting the compiler" is easier in Rust than in ATS. On the other hand, if any cost is worth whatever level of safety Rust offers for any project, than Rust wouldn't exist because there are far more popular languages with equal (or better) safety. So Rust's design…

> 1. more compile-time safety is always better, even if it complicates the language (or everyone who uses Rust should use ATS), and 2. any cost is worth paying for safety (or Rust wouldn't exist in the first place).

You keep repeating this. It's not true. If what you said was true, Rust would have adopted HKT, and God knows whatever type astronomy Haskell & Scala cooked up.

There is a balancing act, and Rust decided to plant a flag in memory safety without GC. The fact that Zig, didn't expand on this, but went backwards is more of an indictment of programmers unwilling to adapt and perfect what came before, but to reinvent it in their own worse way.

> There are also different kinds of safety with different value and different costs. For example, spatial memory safety appears to have more value than temporal safety (https://cwe.mitre.org/top25/archive/2025/2025_cwe_top25.html)

How did you derive this from the top 25 of CWEs? Let's say you completely remove the spatial memory issues. You still get temporal memory issues at #6.

Re: Lightpanda migrate DOM implementation to Zig

#48

Post by pron »

Ygg2 wrote: post #47
pron wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a very narrow way of looking at things. ATS has a much stronger "deterministic safety net" than Rust, yet the reason to use Rust over ATS is that "fighting the compiler" is easier in Rust than in ATS. On the other hand, if any cost is worth whatever level of safety Rust offers for any project, than Rust wouldn't exist because there are far more popular languages with equal (or better) safety. So Rust's design…

> 1. more compile-time safety is always better, even if it complicates the language (or everyone who uses Rust should use ATS), and 2. any cost is worth paying for safety (or Rust wouldn't exist in the first place). You keep repeating this. It's not true. If what you said was true, Rust would have adopted HKT, and God knows whatever type astronomy Haskell & Scala cooked up. There is a balancing act, and Rust decided…

Rust does have a GC, but I agree it planted its flag at some intermediate point on the spectrum. Zig didn't "go backwards" but planted its own flag ever so slightly closer to C than to ATS (although both Rust and Zig are almost indistinguishable from C when compare to ATS). I don't know if where Rust planted its flag is universally better than where Zig planted its flag, but 1. no one else does either, 2. both are compromises, and 3. it's uncertain whether a universal sweet spot exists in the first place.

> How did you derive this from the top 25 of CWEs? Let's say you completely remove the spatial memory issues. You still get temporal memory issues at #6.

Sure, but spatial safety is higher. So if Rust's compromise, we'll exact a price on temporal safety and have both temporal and spatial safety, is reasonable, then so is Zig's that says, the price on temporal safety is too high for what you get in return, but spatial safety only is a better deal. Neither go as far as ATS in offering, in principle, the ability to avoid all bugs. Nobody knows whether Rust's compormise is universally better than Zig's or vice versa (or perhaps neither is universally better), but I find it really strange to arbitrarily claim that one compromise is reasonable and the other isn't, where both are obviously compromises that recognise there are different benefits and different costs, and that not every benefit is worth any cost.

Re: Lightpanda migrate DOM implementation to Zig

#49

Post by daddykotex »

kristopolous wrote: post #18

I've been using it for months now ever since I saw their presentation at GitHub This is a common flow for me lightpanda url | markitdown (microsoft) | sd (day50 streamdown) I even have it as a shell alias, wv(). It's way better than the crusty old lynx and links on sites that need JS. It's solid. Definitely worth a check

Thanks for the tip, that's very cool. I did not know about `markitdown` and `streamdown`.

Re: Lightpanda migrate DOM implementation to Zig

#50

Post by surajrmal »

pjmlp wrote: post #43
pron wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that a language that was meant to compete with C++ and in 10+ years hasn't captured 10% of C++'s (already diminished) market share could be said to have become "kind of the default" for anything (and certainly not when that requires generalising from n≅1).

It has for Amazon, Adobe, Microsoft, Google and the Linux kernel. It remains to be seen which big name will make Zig unavoidable.

While certain teams within Google are using rust by default, I'm not sure rust is anywhere close in scale for new lines of code committed per week to c++.
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