Andreas Kling aka @awesomekling wrote:
We’ve been evaluating a number of C++ successor languages for @ladybirdbrowser , and the one best suited to our needs appears to be @SwiftLang 🪶
Over the last few months, I’ve asked a bunch of folks to pick some little part of our project and try rewriting it in the different languages we were evaluating. The feedback was very clear: everyone preferred Swift!
Why do we like Swift?
First off, Swift has both memory & data race safety (as of v6). It’s also a modern language with solid ergonomics.
Something that matters to us a lot is OO. Web specs & browser internals tend to be highly object-oriented, and life is easier when you can model specs closely in your code. Swift has first-class OO support, in many ways even nicer than C++.
The Swift team is also investing heavily in C++ interop, which means there’s a real path to incremental adoption, not just gigantic rewrites.
Strong ties to Apple?
Swift has historically been strongly tied to Apple and their platforms, but in the last year, there’s been a push for “swiftlang” to become more independent. (It’s now in a separate GitHub org, no longer in “apple”, for example).
Support for non-Apple platforms is also improving, as is the support for other, LSP-based development environments.
What happens next?
We aren’t able to start using it just yet, as the current release of Swift ships with a version of Clang that’s too old to grok our existing C++ codebase. But when Swift 6 comes out of beta this fall, we will begin using it!
No language is perfect, and there are a lot of things here that we don’t know yet. I’m not aware of anyone doing browser engine stuff in Swift before, so we’ll probably end up with feedback for the Swift team as well.
I’m super excited about this! We must steer Ladybird towards memory safety, and the first step is selecting a successor language that we can begin adopting very soon. 🤓🐞
This seems like such a poor choice if you want a cross platform browser.
Probably to be a cross platform wide-adopted browser is not the goal, and the author hopes to find a niche userbase amongst conservative macOS users to feed his narcissism.
What?
I mean this sincerely, I’ve been loosely following this project and the OS it is from and would like to know more about what you know, because this is the first time I’ve heard such accusations.
It’s a reference to this: https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/pull/6814#issuecomment-830793992
They have a phobia of making changes that are valid if they perceive the change to be motivated by politics. In the example above, the PR is denied because they have been convinced that the PR is about accommodating trans people. The existence of trans people and accommodating them via grammar is political for certain kinds of conservatives. The irony is that their own political beliefs are affecting their ability to distinguish a valid change from a politically-motivated one.
Not necessarily. The language itself is implemented on LLVM and compiles to a variety of backends, and can interoperate with C and C++ (including presenting C++ classes and STL types in its type system). Toolchains exist for Windows and Linux, as well as Apple platforms, and porting them to other POSIX-like OSes shouldn’t be too hard. The core of the language and its Foundation runtime library are open-source and cross-platform; it’s only macOS/iOS APIs and higher-level frameworks built on them like SwiftUI which are proprietary. Swift is in use on non-Apple platforms: there’s the Kitura web framework, which gets deployed mostly on Linux, and someone has recently used it to write games for the PlayDate handheld console.
In general, I can’t fault his rationale there. Swift has more modern language features (such as an expressive type system) than Go, is not quite as fiddly as Rust, isn’t a trainwreck of incompatible levels of abstraction like C++, and has developer momentum behind it unlike Dart.
Reading that really makes me want to give it a go. If swift’s package management is anything like Rust or Go, I could see myself enjoying it
I’ve worked with Swift a bunch for Apple platforms, am mildly familiar with how it works on other platforms. It should be able to compile on a wide host of platforms with minimal/no issues. The runtime dependencies are localized to Apple platforms, and I think the dominant UI toolkit on other platforms is a Swift port of qt. So it should be just fine?
