Ladybird browser to start using Swift language this fall • Hacker News Board

Re: Ladybird browser to start using Swift language this fall

#141

Post by rvense » Sat, Aug 10, 2024, 2:28 PM UTC

arresin wrote: post #57

rvense wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ladybird and Serenity have a policy of not allowing any sort of expression of or reference to someone's sexuality or gender identity, as this is deemed "divisive" or "politicising". Rust does... not have that.

You are purposefully taking a wild assumption to frame his character a certain way because of your politics. This is literally the kind of toxic divisiveness he’s talking about. Can’t you see how this makes people want to have nothing to do with this issue?

You are right. I don't in fact know if that's what he means by calling the Rust community "toxic".

I've never seen anything like a bigoted word attributed to Andreas, by all appearences he is one of the most caring people in open source, and his character is obviously a big part of Serenity's success in attracting followers and contributers. But he does seem to be very insistent on "having nothing to do with the issue" (of inclusivity). His stated goal is to make a welcoming and inclusive environment, and ultimately I just think letting Pixie Ada put pride flags in xer bio will be more succesful at that than a don't ask, don't tell policy that seems mostly geared to not bother people who happen to fit in by default.

Re: Ladybird browser to start using Swift language this fall

#142

Post by cube2222 » Sat, Aug 10, 2024, 2:29 PM UTC

cube2222 wrote: post #43

stephen_g wrote: post #16

I had suspected this would happen, I haven’t got into Swift yet (I’m mostly doing embedded C still) but Swift finally seems to have just ticked off some niggles that makes it a much stronger contender. Things like not having official Debian builds (there were Ubuntu etc.), not being able to run under other C libraries like musl (like if you want to run in Alpine Linux containers), not really being able to run embedde…

Honestly, Swift seems like such a nice language. Most of the performance and power, great interop, but more directed at application development than Rust (with e.g. refcounting being the default). But as they say, you choose a language for its ecosystem, not for the language itself. It would be great if Swift’s open source ecosystem for stuff other than app development grew. It does indeed seem like Apple is pushing…

Found an interesting article about the internals of async specifically[0], also the docs[1].

TLDR: Seems like it uses a global thread pool, where each async method call yields to the runtime. Additionally, you get actors which are special classes with serialized method calls, and everybody other than itself has to call those methods as async. Additionally, you can have custom executors, who, if I understand correctly, still only pass tasks to the global thread pool, but can influence the scheduling order. Finally, you can force functions/actors to run on the main thread (outside of the thread-pool) as iOS requires the UI to run on the main thread.

Interestingly (from an API evolution perspective), async protocol functions can be implemented in classes by synchronous functions, as async in swift means "this could be async". Which plays well with the fact that async functions can call sync ones, but not vice-versa.

Additionally, it has cooperative cancellation (you can basically check if you've been cancelled and react accordingly). Concurrency is by default structured, and cancelling a parent task will cancel its children.

[0]: https://swiftrocks.com/how-async-await-works-internally-in-s...

[1]: https://docs.swift.org/swift-book/documentation/the-swift-pr...

Re: Ladybird browser to start using Swift language this fall

#143

Post by __float » Sat, Aug 10, 2024, 2:30 PM UTC

littlestymaar wrote: post #83

skipkey wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could be an age thing. When I was taught grammar 40 plus years ago, for someone of indeterminate sex, “he” was taught as always appropriate, “he or she” was a somewhat clunky alternative that was situationally appropriate where you were stressing the gender neutrality, and “they” was just simply bad grammar which would get you bad marks. I’m honestly not sure when that changed.

“They” is particularly convenient when discussing about people over the internet, because not only we don't have to assume the person's gender, but we don't have to assume if it's an individual or a group either. And tbh using gender in pronouns is artificially annoying, and it's good to see English has a way out of it, like it got rid of giving genders to common objects like most European languages (“Non, it's La ch…

Languages hold complexity in different areas, but that doesn't make it artificial. Grammatical gender (and noun classes more generally) may seem redundant, but redundancy in language is quite common. It helps disambiguate, as it turns out speech (especially, but writing too) is a very lossy method of communicating.

(You seem perfectly happy distinguishing between animate/inanimate nouns and choosing "it" or "he/she/they" -- that's a difference not all languages make, but should we get rid of it in English too?)

Re: Ladybird browser to start using Swift language this fall

#144

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Aug 10, 2024, 2:35 PM UTC

Affric wrote: post #7

============================== Andreas Kling @awesomekling · 44m My general thoughts on Rust: - Excellent for short-lived programs that transform input A to output B - Clunky for long-lived programs that maintain large complex object graphs - Really impressive ecosystem - Toxic community ==============================

[deleted]

Re: Ladybird browser to start using Swift language this fall

#145

Post by pjmlp » Sat, Aug 10, 2024, 2:35 PM UTC

layer8 wrote: post #138

pjmlp wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reference counting is also a GC algorithm, even though people pretend otherwise, as they seldom learn from CS literature. Plus all systems languages with GC, including C#, can do C and C++ style memory management.

This is an old argument, and it’s well understood that “GC” by default refers to tracing GC and delayed collection. (Without delayed collection, there arguably isn’t any “garbage” in the first place.) “Can do C++ style memory management” is very different from what happens when coding in the default idiomatic style of the language and when using existing libraries written in the language. What happens by default is a…

Understood as such by those that don't grok CS.

What is relevant is if one is actually skilled in using their tools, or should be doing something else instead.

Re: Ladybird browser to start using Swift language this fall

#146

Post by throwaway215234 » Sat, Aug 10, 2024, 2:37 PM UTC

commodoreboxer wrote: post #133

throwaway215234 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm starting to wonder if the Rust toxicity and evangelism are more meme than reality. Doubtful. If you're running a somewhat known FOSS C or C++ project, chances are you've had to close issues from Rust fanatics aggressively urging you for a rewrite, and shaming you if you object. Nothing has changed in that regard.

I do, and I haven't.

I'm glad you've been spared. That doesn't really negate all the negativity and outright harassment that lots of people have experienced with the Rust community.

I think the best example is the continuous vandalization of cppreference [0][1]. I've never seen such behavior from another language community. There's also continuous mocking/brigading campaigns organized on reddit and mastodon.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36349576

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Cplusplus/comments/14aiwqj/cpprefer...

Re: Ladybird browser to start using Swift language this fall

#147

Post by nequo » Sat, Aug 10, 2024, 2:37 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #40

peppermint_gum wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Swift's LLVM fork is open-source, just not upstreamed. No Free Software license requires forks to upstream their changes. https://github.com/swiftlang/llvm-project

Yet you're complaining that they are using the licence exactly as they feel like.

Parent was not complaining. Parent was asking what the rationale is behind maintaining a separate LLVM fork instead of upstreaming and reducing the maintenance burden on Apple engineers.

Re: Ladybird browser to start using Swift language this fall

#148

Post by pjmlp » Sat, Aug 10, 2024, 2:39 PM UTC

neonsunset wrote: post #128

layer8 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GC still has the downside of higher memory overhead. While I’m not particularly a fan of Swift, this is a relevant argument for a general-purpose browser implementation.

The degree to which GC issues in the context of deterministic memory management apply to C# is incomparably lower to pretty much every other language that offers GC (especially JVM family) or a similar automatic memory management capability (except Swift or D). However, D's GC is very rudimentary, and Swift pays very hefty performance price imposed by ARC for lower memory footprint and somewhat more predictable memor…

Until Zig has a good story for use after free, I wouldn't be considering it.

Regarding C#, there was some research work at MSR for improving escape analysis and IDispose usage via lifetime analysis, but seems to never have moved beyond proof of concept.

By the way, Midori internal presentation from 2013 is doing the rounds on twittersphere.

Re: Ladybird browser to start using Swift language this fall

#149

Post by freedomben » Sat, Aug 10, 2024, 2:45 PM UTC

skipkey wrote: post #61

Spivak wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such a weird thread, sure it's a nit but grammatically a person of unknown sex should be either "he or she" or "they." And the latter is by far the preferred form by English writers regardless of political affiliation. It didn't become a political thing until Andreas made it political. It would have taken two seconds to be like "+1 Good catch man, merged."

It could be an age thing. When I was taught grammar 40 plus years ago, for someone of indeterminate sex, “he” was taught as always appropriate, “he or she” was a somewhat clunky alternative that was situationally appropriate where you were stressing the gender neutrality, and “they” was just simply bad grammar which would get you bad marks. I’m honestly not sure when that changed.

Indeed. I was taught very directly that the singular pronouns were he, she, and it. The plurals were we, you, they. So grammatically if you were referring to a singular person of unknown sex, then you should use "it" .

Obviously using the pronoun "it" at some point became offensive, so is highly not recommended. But, (probably after having drilled into my head repeatedly that "they" is a plural) it seems very incorrect to my ears when "they" is used to describe a singular person. It also unfortunately comes with ambiguity sometimes. I've had misunderstandings where I used they as a singular pronoun to describe someone of unknown gender, and the person I was talking to took it as a reference to a plural, which at best creates confusion, at worst misleads.

Language is an incredibly hard problem, and it certainly doesn't help that as youth, we are drilled with supposedly objective truth regarding language, when in reality it is far less defined and more nebulous than than the teachers would have us believe. The generational gaps can already be tricky to navigate. Having different ideas of objective truth, especially regarding language, certainly does not help.

Re: Ladybird browser to start using Swift language this fall

#150

Post by fabrice_d » Sat, Aug 10, 2024, 2:46 PM UTC

LoganDark wrote: post #114

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then build your own browser in Rust, start contributing to Servo, and who cares when a volunteer writes a browser in any language? Write a browser in COBOL for all I care. If it’s open source, it’s still a gift.

> start contributing to Servo Servo as a browser is (sort of) dead, though webrender still lives. I remember when (back when the icon was a doge) it had an actual UI and could be used as a real web browser... that's all been stripped out now. https://book.servo.org/ : > Work is still ongoing to make Servo consumable as a webview library, so for now, the only supported way to use Servo is via servoshell, our winit- an…

Servo was never usable as a "real browser", and it's been revived since last year by Igalia. Looks like you should refresh your view on the project overall.