It’s a common misconception that comes from the standard library data structures, which almost all do implement CoW

I 100% agree with your statement. My case is that a simple language does not necessarily result in simpler and more readable code. You need a language that fits the problem domain and that does not require a lot of boilerplate to handle more complex structures. If you are shoehorning a problem into an overly simplistic language, then you are fighting your tool. OO for OO. FP for FP. and so on.

I fear that the current fashion to very simple languages is a result of confusing these aspects and by way of enforcing certain corporate behaviours on coders. Perhaps that has its place eg Go in Google - but the presumption that one size fits all is quite a big limitation for many areas.

The corollary of this is that richness places an burden of responsibility on the coder not to write code golf. By tbh you can write bad code in any language if you put your mind to it.

Perhaps many find richness and expressivity abhorrent - but to those of us who like Larry's thinking it is a really nice, addictive feeling when the compiler gets out of the way. Don't knock it until you give it a fair try!

Problem is, that makes every small part of the program simple, but it increases the number of parts (and/or their interaction). And ultimately, if you need to understand the whole thing it's suddenly much harder.

Surely you can write the same behaviour in "clever" (when did that become a negative attribute?) or "good" way in assembly. You are correct. But that's a different matter.

I agree with you. I also agree that this decision is an example of that.

SerenityOS had an "everything from scratch in one giant mono-repo" rule. It was, explicitly a hobby project and one rooted in enjoyment and 'idealism from the get go. It was founded by a man looking for something productive to focus on instead of drugs. It was therapy. Hence the name.

Ladybird, as an independent project, was founded with the goal of being the only truly independent web browser (independent from corporate control generally and Google specifically).

They have been very focussed on that, have not had any sacred cows, and have shed A LOT of the home-grown infrastructure they inherited from being part of SerenityOS. Sometimes that saddens me a little but there is no denying that it has sped them up.

Their progress has been incredible. This comment is being written in Ladybird. I have managed GitHub projects in Ladybird. I have sent Gmail messages in Ladybird. It is not "ready" but it blows my mind how close it is.

I think Ladybid will be a "usable" browser before we enter 2027. That is just plain amazing.

Ranges are not memory safe. Sorry.

Having a checklist of "things not to do" is historically a pretty in effectiveway to ensure memory safety, which is why the parent comment was asking for details. The fact that this type of thing gets dismissed as a non-issue is honestly a huge part of the problem in my opinion; it's time to move on from pretending this is a skill issue.

I can totally imagine how a prolific and ambitious developer would create a world of their own, essentially another language with domain-specific vocabulary and primitives. People often talk about using a "subset of C++" to make it manageable for mortals, and I think the somewhat unusual consideration of Swift was related to this desire for an ergonomic language to express and solve the needs of the project.

Personally I wouldn't mind either but my point is that they probably want to cater to the average person, and not just security conscious tech savvy people, and if that's the case, then you really can't exclude FB/IG/YT and others from working properly in your browser.

This kills the internet.

Here's a Python rut:

  n = 20  # how many numbers to generate
  a, b = 0, 1
  for _ in range(n):
    print(a, end=" ")
    a, b = b, a + b
  print()

  (0,1,*+*...*)[^20]

My read is that that this is the main thing that happened here.

The Ladybird team is quite pragmatic. Or, at least their founder is. I think they understood the scale of buidling a browser. They understood that it was a massive undertaking. They also understood the security challenge of building an application so big that processes untrusted input as its main job. So, they thought that perhaps they needed a better language than C++ for these reasons. They evaluated a few options and came away thinking that Swift was the best, so they announced that they expected to move towards Swift in the future.

But the other side of being pragamatic is that, as time passed, they also realized how hard it would be to chagne horses. And they are quite productivity driven. They produce a YouTube video every month detailing their progress including charts and numbers.

Making no progress on the "real" job of building a browser to make progress on the somewhat artificial job of moving to a new programming language just never made sense I guess.

And the final part of being pragmatic is that, after months of not really making any progress on the switch, the founder posted this patch essentially admitting the reality and suggesting they just formalize the lack of progress and move on.

The lack of progress on Swift that is. Their progress on making a browser has been absolutely mind-blowing. This comment is being written in Ladybird.

It's a cool project and I'd consider it for a toy language but it's far from an LLVM replacement.

I don't see a case for "complex" vs "simple" in the comparison with natural languages.

Here's a very simple, lexical declaration made more human friendly by use of the preposition `my` (or `our` if it is packaged scoped)...

  my $x = 42;

BTW, one side benefit of LP is freedom from arbitrary structure of DSLs. A standard practice in LP is to declare and define objects in the spot in which they are being used; LP tools will parse them out and distribute to the syntactically correct places.

I was hired around Google around the same time, but not nearly as famous :)

AFAICouldT it was a "hire first, figure out what to do later", and it ended up being Swift for TensorFlow. That went ~nowhere, and he left within 2 years.

That's fine and doesn't reflect on him, in general, that's Google for ya. At least that era of Google.

It doesn't build a list, rather it dumps it as it goes.

It has an explicit print.

It uses a named constant for 20 rather than a literal.

etc, etc...

Moreover, Servo aims to be embeddable (there are some working examples already), which is where other non-Chrome/ium browsers are failing (and Firefox too). Thanks to this it has much better chance at wider adoption and actually spawning multiple browsers.

And someone will be stuck not to do anything because they are unsatisfied with all languages. :-)

You could imagine creating a modified Go assembler that is more generic and not tied to Go's ABI that could accomplish the same effect as LLVM. However, it'd probably be better to create a project like that from scratch, because most of Go's optimizations happen before reaching the assembler stage.

It would probably be best to have the intermediate language that QBE has and transform that into "intermediate assembly" (IA) very similar to Go's assembly. That way the IL stage could contain nearly all the optimization passes, and the IA stage would focus on code generation that would translate to any OS/arch combo.

let x = 42

Well, when you add in the '$' and ';' tokens the "let" example is still shorter. Also as another person replied to you, those other two examples are declarations in other languages. So 0 for 3 there.

Lots of people seem really committed to OOP. Rust is definitely a bad fit if you can't imagine writing code without classes and objects. I don't think this makes rust is a bad language for the problem. Its just, perhaps, makes rust a bad language for some programmers.

Sort of an exception that proves the rule. Yes, it's great and was released for free. But at least partially that's not a strategic decision from Apple but just a requirement of the LGPLv2 license[1] under which they received it (as KHTML) originally.

And even then, it was Blink and not WebKit that ended up providing better value to the community.

[1] It does bear pointing out that lots of the new work is dual-licensed as 2-clause BSD also. Though no one is really trying to test a BSD-only WebKit derivative, as the resulting "Here's why this is not a derived work of the software's obvious ancestor" argument would be awfully dicey to try to defend. The Ship of Theseus is not a recognized legal principle, and clean rooms have historically been clean for a reason.

My understanding is that by default you are not allowed to contribute to open-source even if its your own project. Exceptions are made for teams whose function is to work on those open-source project e.g. Swift/LLVM/etc...

Really? In the other Python version the author went out of his way to keep two variables, and shit out intermediate results as you went. The raku version generates a sequence that doesn't even actually get output if you're executing inside a program, but that can be used later as a sequence, if you bind it to something.

I kept my version to the same behavior as that Python version, but that's different than the raku version, and not in a good way.

You should actually ignore the print in the python, since the raku wasn't doing it anyway. So how is "create a sequence, then while it is not as long as you like, append the sum of the last two elements" a terrible mix of styles and paradigms, anyway? Where do you get off writing that?

> Lines of code don't matter anyway, cognitive load does.

I agree, and the raku line of code imposes a fairly large cognitive load.

If you prefer "for" to "while" for whatever reason, here's a similar Python to the raku.

  seq = [0,1]
  seq.extend(sum(seq[-2:]) for _ in range(18))

> If you're only used to imperative code, then yeah, maybe the Python looks more familiar, though then... how about riding some new bicycles for the mind.

It's not (in my case, anyway) actually about imperative vs functional. It's about twisty stupid special symbol meanings.

Raku is perl 6 and it shows. Some people like it and that's fine. Some people don't and that's fine, too. What's not fine is to make up bogus comparisons and bogus implications about the people who don't like it.

Rust was born at Mozilla, sort of. It was created by a Mozilla employee. The first "real" project to put it into action was Servo of which parts were adopted into Firefox. While Rust may not have been developed "specifically" to create a browser, it is a fair comment.

That said, Ladybird was started as part of the SerenityOS project. That entire project was built using C++. If the original goal of Serenity was to build an opeerating system, C++ would have felt like a reasonable choice at the time.

By the time Ladybird was looking for "better" languages than C++, Ladybird was already a large project and was making very heavy use of traditional OOP. Rust was evaluated but rejected because it did not support OOP well. Or, at least, it did not support integration into a large, C++ based, OOP project.

Perhaps, if Ladybird had first selected a languge to write a browser from scratch, they would have gone with Rust. We will never know,

We do know that Mozilla, despite being the de facto stewards of Rust at the time, and having a prototype web browser written in Rust (Servo), decided to drop both Rust and Servo. So, perhaps using Rust for browsers is not as open and shut as you imply.

I think you are conflating the development of Servo with the design and development of Rust.

Tools to do X better are often designed by people who get paid a lot to do X and worry about losing their job if they are not good enough at X.

If he were to tell me that he didn't imagine Rust's helping with browser dev when he designed Rust, then I'd believe him, but the "circumstantial" evidence points strongly in the other direction.

I won't say never, but it would take an exceedingly large comp plan for me to sign paperwork forbidding me from working on hobby projects. That's pretty orwellian. I'm not allowed to work on hobby projects on company time, but that seems fair, since I also can't spend work hours doing non-programming hobbies either.

I suspect it's not just Apple, I have "lost" so many good GitHub friends - incredible artisans and contributors, they've gotten well-payed jobs and then suddenly... not a single green dot on the wall since. That's sad. I hope they're getting paid more than enough.

I've been programming in Rust for 5 years and I could barely understand the code in their repo. Not because it was somehow advanced but because it didn't make any sense. It felt like that with every decision they could make, they always chose the hardest way.

On the other hand, I have never done any C++ (besides few tutorials) in my life and yet I found both Serenity/Ladybird and also WebKit to be very readable and understandable.

BTW: If anyone wants to reply that Rust is different then yes, of course it is - but that's the point, if there is a language that maps nicely to your problem domain, it's also very fast, and well-understood then why the hell you'd use a language that is well-known to NOT map to OOP?

So, yes it is still pre-historic.

> Once it gets embedding stabilized that will be the time for a full blown browser developement.

Servo development began in 2012. [0] 14 years later we get a v0.0.1.

At this point, Ladybird will likely reach 1.0 faster than Servo could, and the latter is not even remotely close to being usable even in 14 years of waiting.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servo_(software)

> it's OK for you to insult a person.

I made an analogy which just means that it's hard to understand what the different styles and paradigms are when those are the things you constantly use.

You're apparently taking that as an insult...

> But you apparently missed that the "twisty" part

I didn't miss anything. You just didn't explain it. "twisty" does not mean "ambiguous" or "hard to parse". Can't miss what you don't write.

$ raku -e 'say (0, 1, 2, * × * ... )[^10]' # for readability (0 1 2 2 4 8 32 256 8192 2097152)

$ raku -e 'say (0, 1, 2, * * ... *)[^10]' # for typeability (0 1 2 2 4 8 32 256 8192 2097152)

I haven’t used it in a couple decades, but I do remember it fondly. I also suspect I’d hate it nowadays. Its roots are in a language that seemed revolutionary in the 80s and 90s - Smalltalk - and the melding of it with C also seemed revolutionary at the time. But the very same features that made it great then probably (just speculating - again I haven’t used it in a couple decades) aren’t so great now because a different evolutionary tree leapfrogged ahead of it. So most investment went into developing different solutions to the same problems, and ObjC, like Smalltalk, ends up being a weird anachronism that doesn’t play so nicely with modern tooling.

I haven’t used it in Apple’s ecosystem, so maybe I am way off base here. But it seems to me that it was Apple’s effort to evolve the language away from its systems roots into a more suitable applications language that caused all the ugliness.

It sounds like you're speculating. But this doesn't match the reality of actual Rust code. For example, here's the complete, actual code for the `Widget` trait implementation for the `Button` struct in the egui framework:

    impl Widget for Button<'_> {
        fn ui(self, ui: &mut Ui) -> Response {
            self.atom_ui(ui).response
        }
    }

This is OO code. It's just that it's trait-oriented, not class-oriented. But that's a good thing, not a drawback. Traits are more precise, more flexible, more type-safe, and don't conflate multiple unrelated concerns in a single feature the way class inheritance does. OO languages like Java support a very similar approach, via interfaces.

You can find similar code in any Rust GUI library, and indeed in almost any non-trivial Rust program.

> Otherwise, there'd be no difference and everyone would call Rust an OO language.

Rust is not a class-based OO language. But the fact that one of its core features, traits, have "methods", and those methods have a first argument traditionally named `self` should be a clue. Trait-based OO is very much OO. Whether "Rust is an OO language" depends on how strictly you want to define "OO" to match the rather obsolete 1970s conception of it.

This is why the first question I asked you was "What OO features are you thinking of that Rust doesn't have?" Because "OO" is a broad label that covers a wide range of different features.

Rust doesn't have "classes", but classes are a 1970s-era mish-mash of a whole bunch of different concerns munged together into a single poorly-factored construct. Now, half a century later, that's well understood, and better solutions exist in the form of traits and interfaces, and related capabilities.

> Like why did ObjC feel the need to add ARC (not GC but similar goal)?

Same reason Rust includes `Rc` and `Arc`. A general-purpose language has to provide some solution to memory management based on reachability. Reference counting and tracing GC are common solutions to that. Rust's static memory management plus RC is plenty good enough for GUI applications.

I actually suspect that ObjC and the NeXT APIs played a big part in that success. I know they’ve fallen out of favor now, and for reasons I have to assume are good. But back in the early 2000s, the difference in how quickly I could develop a good GUI for OS X compared to what I was used to on Windows and GNOME was life changing. It attracted a bunch of developers to the platform, not just me, which spurred an accumulation of applications with noticeably better UX that, in turn, helped fuel Apple’s consumer sentiment revival.

You're using a definition of OOP where only Smalltalk-style message passing counts. By that definition, you're right: Swift is closer, because `@objc` exists. But by that definition, neither Swift nor Rust is an OOP language in any meaningful sense, and the delta between them is mass-of-the-electron tiny. Swift's message passing support is an annotation that is a compatibility shim for a 40-year-old runtime, not a design philosophy.

So when you say Swift has "better OO support"... sure, in the same way that my car has better submarine support than yours because I left the windows cracked and water could theoretically get in. Technically true! Not useful!

The Ladybird team are C++ developers evaluating languages for a browser engine. When C++ developers say "OOP" they mean classes, inheritance hierarchies, virtual methods. The DOM is a giant inheritance tree. That's the context. You can tell them they're using the word wrong, but that doesn't change what they meant, and what they meant is the only thing that matters for understanding whether the claim made sense.

And under their definition-which is also the definition used by mass, essentially every working programmer and every university curriculum for the last 30 years-Swift and Rust are actually pretty close, which was my original point. Swift has `class` with inheritance, Rust has traits and composition. Neither is Smalltalk. The claim that Swift is "strictly better" was weird no matter which definition you pick.

(Also, and I say this respectfully: characterizing C++/Java/Rust as "functional programming" because they encapsulate data with functions is... a take. I get the logic chain you're following but that is not a definition that will help anyone communicate with anyone else, which is presumably the point of definitions.)

Functional programming is not "encapsulating data in 'objects'". Such a model would naturally feature methods like "void Die.roll()", "void list.Add(element)" which are definitely not functional programming (which emphasizes immutability, pure functions, composition, etc.)

These definitions are not at odds with the discussion at hand at all. It was clearly stated that Swift has better OO support. Which is obviously true because it tries to be compatible with Objective-C, and therefore needs to have some level of OO support. That is something that Rust has no interest in doing, and rightfully so.

Your redefinition violates the claim, and therefore we can logically determine that it is not what was being used in the rest of the thread. That is, aside from the confused Rust guy that set this tangent in motion, but the remainder of this thread was merely clarifying to him what was originally intended. "He has a different definition for OOP" doesn't really help his understanding. That is what this thread branch has always been about, so it is not clear where you are trying to go with that.

I'm certainly not clever enough to have built it. Not to mention that the person who coined OOP is quite famous for having done so. I am not him, I can assure you. I have merely ingested it from what is out there in widespread circulation.

I can appreciate that you live in a different bubble and what is widespread there is not the same. It's a pretty big world out there. However, it doesn't really matter as if "C++ is a functional programming language" doesn't jive with your understanding, as you'll simply ask: "What ever do you mean?" and which point "functional programming language" will be defined and a shared understanding will be reached.

This isn't the problem you are imagining.

> I did.

Right. Seems we encountered a communication barrier again. "That's the thing man, there isn't anything." in my world would read "That's the thing man, there are things and here they are: ..." However, this highlights again that it doesn't actually harm communication as further clarification follows and eventually everyone will reach a shared understanding. Communication isn't some kind of TV game show where you have to get the right answer on your first try. This is not a problem in any way, shape, or form.