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Closing this as we are no longer pursuing Swift adoption

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Re: Closing this as we are no longer pursuing Swift adoption

#11

Post by amluto »

drnick1 wrote: post #4

Not too surprising. Swift is too tied to Apple and it's not really clear what the benefit would be relative to a subset of C++ written with contemporary memory safety practices. It's a battle tested choice and pretty much every browser actually in use is written in C++.

> a subset of C++ written with contemporary memory safety practices

What is this mythical subset of C++? Does it include use of contemporary STL features like string_view? (Don’t get me wrong — modern STL is considerably improved, but it’s not even close to being memory-safe.)

Re: Closing this as we are no longer pursuing Swift adoption

#12

Post by fdefitte »

ahartmetz wrote: post #8
drnick1 wrote: post #4

Not too surprising. Swift is too tied to Apple and it's not really clear what the benefit would be relative to a subset of C++ written with contemporary memory safety practices. It's a battle tested choice and pretty much every browser actually in use is written in C++.

Well, it was a terrible idea in any case unless it was for high-level-ish code only. Swift generally can't compete with C++ in raw performance (in the same way as Java - yeah, there are benchmarks where it's faster, but it basically doesn't happen in real programs).

[dead]

Re: Closing this as we are no longer pursuing Swift adoption

#14

Post by ahartmetz »

fdefitte wrote: post #12
ahartmetz wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it was a terrible idea in any case unless it was for high-level-ish code only. Swift generally can't compete with C++ in raw performance (in the same way as Java - yeah, there are benchmarks where it's faster, but it basically doesn't happen in real programs).

[dead]

It wasn't the reason why it was removed, but, well we agree, it would have been a problem if used indiscriminately. I didn't do any additional research, but what I read in public was simply "Ladybird is going to use Swift".

Re: Closing this as we are no longer pursuing Swift adoption

#15

Post by abraxas »

drnick1 wrote: post #4

Not too surprising. Swift is too tied to Apple and it's not really clear what the benefit would be relative to a subset of C++ written with contemporary memory safety practices. It's a battle tested choice and pretty much every browser actually in use is written in C++.

Wasn't Rust developed specifically for Mozilla? Isn't mozilla written in Rust?

Re: Closing this as we are no longer pursuing Swift adoption

#18

Post by jarjoura »

guywithahat wrote: post #7
WCSTombs wrote: post #3

That's interesting, what happened? They don't explain it there. For the record, I don't have a dog in this fight. As long as it runs on Linux, I'm willing to test drive it when it's ready.

It looked to me like it was just due to recurring build issues. Lots of "swift can't import these conflicting C++ versioned libraries concurrently" and "can't use some operator due to versioning or build conflicts". Basically it sounds like trying to add swift to the project was breaking too many things, and they decided it wasn't worth it. It's a shame, I think swift is an underappreciated language, however I unders…

Looking at their integration, with cmake, they definitely took the hardmode approach to adoption.

Re: Closing this as we are no longer pursuing Swift adoption

#19

Post by wmf »

abraxas wrote: post #15
drnick1 wrote: post #4

Not too surprising. Swift is too tied to Apple and it's not really clear what the benefit would be relative to a subset of C++ written with contemporary memory safety practices. It's a battle tested choice and pretty much every browser actually in use is written in C++.

Wasn't Rust developed specifically for Mozilla? Isn't mozilla written in Rust?

Firefox has some Rust components but it isn't written in Rust overall. Servo is written in Rust but it isn't a full browser.

Re: Closing this as we are no longer pursuing Swift adoption

#20

Post by tvshtr »

abraxas wrote: post #15
drnick1 wrote: post #4

Not too surprising. Swift is too tied to Apple and it's not really clear what the benefit would be relative to a subset of C++ written with contemporary memory safety practices. It's a battle tested choice and pretty much every browser actually in use is written in C++.

Wasn't Rust developed specifically for Mozilla? Isn't mozilla written in Rust?

Yes and yes. Firefox is partially written in Rust.
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