I can’t get behind a browser built from scratch with C, not Rust, considering how integral browsers are to security these days. Plus there’s the whole controversy around their pronouns and politics in coding stances.
what’s wrong with C? if it’s causing issues that it’s written in C, it’s the developers whom are being entrusted with projects that are out of their depth in a project they shouldn’t be responsible for at fault rather than the time-tested language
It’s not that C is bad, but that it’s a bad language in this use case. Rust doesn’t let developers shoot themselves in the foot as easily as C, not to say that it can’t be done.
The comment regarding developers being responsible is true, but they could make their job much easier and thus more accessible to others by using Rust and not being required to learn all the tricks to make C safer in such a critical piece of software.
This isn’t a paid product/gig, so it’s not necessarily attracting top C developers either.
C is great for specific user cases such as code that needs to be exceedingly performant, needs to access low-level devices, or is used on embedded applications.
On a project that doesn’t have these requirements, I believe it is more important to be understandable and has a lower skill floor.
while i can see the position of wishing to go with the language that offers more fundamental forms of safety built into it, a browser is something that i feel must be performant in today’s age of pitifully optimised web pages, to have a browser for these which inefficiently handles the processing of this i feel would be a major issue. of course, the fault here isn’t of the browser developers but of the people making the pages, but they don’t seem to show any signs of changing so for now we must deal with javascript-laden purgatory which can only really be alleviated slightly by having a browser handle it well.
secondly is that i feel the sheer quantity of C developers as opposed to the numbers of rust developers at present would suggest that the contributor pool for a C based project would be greater, though of course this is subject to change, and if it were to change so greatly then i could see it taking a path similar to linux wherein rust becomes interspersed into the project.
at present, i see no other exclusively rust browser being worked on that is in any reasonable state, though it would be good to have one for the sake of having varied options of course, if memory serves me right, the ladybird team got the gmail web client running on their browser, so things are coming along well by technical terms. in my view, this project is one deserving of support primarily due to simply not being affiliated with either chromium or firefox’s codebases, one new player in the browser market is another success for end user choice, and should a rust-based browser come along itself, then that’d make two new players both all the welcome.
I can’t get behind a browser built from scratch with C, not Rust, considering how integral browsers are to security these days. Plus there’s the whole controversy around their pronouns and politics in coding stances.
what’s wrong with C? if it’s causing issues that it’s written in C, it’s the developers whom are being entrusted with projects that are out of their depth in a project they shouldn’t be responsible for at fault rather than the time-tested language
It’s not that C is bad, but that it’s a bad language in this use case. Rust doesn’t let developers shoot themselves in the foot as easily as C, not to say that it can’t be done.
The comment regarding developers being responsible is true, but they could make their job much easier and thus more accessible to others by using Rust and not being required to learn all the tricks to make C safer in such a critical piece of software.
This isn’t a paid product/gig, so it’s not necessarily attracting top C developers either.
C is great for specific user cases such as code that needs to be exceedingly performant, needs to access low-level devices, or is used on embedded applications.
On a project that doesn’t have these requirements, I believe it is more important to be understandable and has a lower skill floor.
while i can see the position of wishing to go with the language that offers more fundamental forms of safety built into it, a browser is something that i feel must be performant in today’s age of pitifully optimised web pages, to have a browser for these which inefficiently handles the processing of this i feel would be a major issue. of course, the fault here isn’t of the browser developers but of the people making the pages, but they don’t seem to show any signs of changing so for now we must deal with javascript-laden purgatory which can only really be alleviated slightly by having a browser handle it well.
secondly is that i feel the sheer quantity of C developers as opposed to the numbers of rust developers at present would suggest that the contributor pool for a C based project would be greater, though of course this is subject to change, and if it were to change so greatly then i could see it taking a path similar to linux wherein rust becomes interspersed into the project.
at present, i see no other exclusively rust browser being worked on that is in any reasonable state, though it would be good to have one for the sake of having varied options of course, if memory serves me right, the ladybird team got the gmail web client running on their browser, so things are coming along well by technical terms. in my view, this project is one deserving of support primarily due to simply not being affiliated with either chromium or firefox’s codebases, one new player in the browser market is another success for end user choice, and should a rust-based browser come along itself, then that’d make two new players both all the welcome.