Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ladybird browser to start using Swift language this fall

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 205 posts

Re: Ladybird browser to start using Swift language this fall

#41

Post by edflsafoiewq »

anon-3988 wrote: post #29
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 ==============================

> - Clunky for long-lived programs that maintain large complex object graphs Interesting observation...I have the exact opposite experience. Rust is especially amazing for long last program because you spend twice as much time developing it and then forget about it for the rest of your lives until you have to change something. And just by browsing the code, a flood of contexts come in because its expressed in the lan…

That quote is describing the program's lifetime (how long a process runs), not the project's.

Re: Ladybird browser to start using Swift language this fall

#42

Post by arresin »

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 ==============================

Agree absolutely with every single point. Especially the last one.

Re: Ladybird browser to start using Swift language this fall

#43

Post by cube2222 »

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 for it with stuff like Swift for embedded. The fairly recent presentation about starting to move FoundationDB to Swift[0] was also very interesting. A follow-up on that at some point would be quite interesting to see too, and would inspire confidence if the process is going well. Arc is also a nice example of a cross-platform app written in Swift, with their fairly recent addition of Windows support.

Either way, fingers crossed, and very happy with TFA.

PS: does anybody have experience with async/await in Swift? Is it pleasant to use?

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQc9-seU-5k

Re: Ladybird browser to start using Swift language this fall

#44

Post by jeltz »

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 ==============================

I love Rust but have to agree that there is a lot of truth in all of those. The Rust community really should take a look at more welcoming and diverse communities like the Ruby and PostgreSQL communities. Not sure though what can be done to make handling long-lived state less clunky.

Re: Ladybird browser to start using Swift language this fall

#45

Post by littlestymaar »

Decabytes wrote: post #33
pas wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

can you please substantiate in which points and how right he is? do you have experience with complex object graphs in Rust, direct or indirect experience about the community? thanks!

This huge blog post goes over some of the challenges of using Rust. https://loglog.games/blog/leaving-rust-gamedev/ For the community I'll pluck out this paragraph > That being said, there is an overwhelming force in the Rust community that when anyone mentions they're having problems with Rust the language on a fundamental level, the answer is "you just don't get it yet, I promise once you get good enough things wil…

It's not specific to Rust at all, I remember hearing the same kind of talks when learning Java because I found OOP confusing.

And in fact most people saying that are right: most of the time people complain about stuff because they haven't internalized how it's suppose to work (as I was).

Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of valid criticism of Rust or Java (and OOP in particular), but at the same time in practice most of the people who complain aren't at the level of understanding and their criticisms aren't good.

Both are true at the same time:

- every programming language has terrible flaws.

- 99.9% of the criticisms you'd see online about a programming language in particular are garbage.

Re: Ladybird browser to start using Swift language this fall

#47

Post by tasty_freeze »

I know Andreas is a prolific coder, but this seems weird to have a pretty functional (but far from complete) browser written in C++ and then casually say, eh, "We are going to rewrite it in another language" in the same way one might say "We've decided to change the branding logo"?

I know that is a run-on sentence, but I need to get my exercise.

Re: Ladybird browser to start using Swift language this fall

#48

Post by Decabytes »

I totally get using Swift in this context considering their heavy emphasis on C++. From my personal experience, Swift still feels like the early days of Open source .NET/Mono. You will definitely experience the growing pains of being an early adopter of the language. The fact that JetBrains killed AppCode in Dec of 2022 7 years after Swift went Open Source is telling to me that getting the traction outside of the Apple ecosystem is not there. The vast majority of the people I see developing open source Swift apps still use Xcode and a Mac. For example Miguel De Icaza is a huge proponent of open source Swift, and is doing a lot of cool things with Swift Godot. But he develops on a Mac just like everyone else. The experience with VScode is just okay.

I think that the cross platform story both in terms of developer libraries, experience, and tooling is still much better on .NET, and provides a happy middle ground between something like Swift and Java. With that beings said I hate the options for Mobile/GUI with .NET (MAUI, or AvaloniaUI), and would recommend Java/Kotlin if you want to do that. I want to give a special shout out to F# as I feel like it is the most sensible functional programming language I've ever used, and is a lot less verbose then C#. The only knock against it I have is that it's a smaller community than C# and most of the libraries you use will be written in C# so you need to know a little C# as well to be effective

Re: Ladybird browser to start using Swift language this fall

#49

Post by [deleted] »

Spivak wrote: post #32
ayhanfuat wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a big fight on Twitter last month because of a comment he made 3 years ago ( https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/pull/6814 ). I think that's closely related.

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."

[deleted]

Re: Ladybird browser to start using Swift language this fall

#50

Post by spencerchubb »

rvense wrote: post #31
LoganDark wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't say all the Rust community is toxic. Then again, I'm not sure which Rust community he's referring to, I'm sure there are some toxic ones out there.

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.

if that is their stated policy, they don't seem to follow it very well since they use 'he' in documentation
Post reply on HN