We’ve been searching for a memory-safe programming language to replace C++ in Ladybird for a while now. We previously explored Swift, but the C++ interop never quite got there, and platform support outside the Apple ecosystem was limited. Rust is a different story. The ecosystem is far more mature for systems programming, and many of our contributors already know the language. Going forward, we are rewriting parts of Ladybird in Rust.
Yeah seems about right for this project. I really wanted this to be a serious browser, but nothing about this dude is serious.
Also I know he backed this statement up with much better testing but these AI brainrot things people say kill me: “I ran multiple passes of adversarial review, asking different models to analyze the code for mistakes and bad patterns.”
“I coded this with hundreds of handcrafted AI prompts.”
“That sounds hazardous, but did you test it?”
“I had multiple AIs test it!”
Let us all hope Servo does not go down the same path.
artisan AI prompts. we are supposed to be paying extra!
You’re not the first I hear saying his bad news/not serious. Afaik I didn’t hear a thing about him until ladybird. What did I missed?
Those were some disappointing reads
God that screenshot is giving me severe second hand embarrassment
I was enthusiastic about LadyBird until I learnt that the guy leading the project i s a white supremacist, via pivot-to-ai.
Now I hope either someone else takes it over, or that it crashes and burns.
If any creator can separate work from personal and the product is good I really couldn’t care less with what they use their own time for.
I’m pretty sure you could find people with other unsavoury opinions in the devteams for both chrome and firefox, what then?
No one can separate their creative idea from the rest of the brain. Any fool that thinks that’s possible is straight up stupid.
I don’t think you should be able to make claims like this without hard proof.
Do you have any information about this?
Edit: So I found out where you read that, and that article is wayyy over thinking that comment.
I think the Twitter comment could be taken multiple ways and it would be fair to give them the benefit of the doubt.
How many times do I have to give him the benefit of the doubt though?
First it was the “using they in documentation is political ideology” Github issue, then he publicly defended DHH when people called him out for being a white supremacist, he implied tech companies are discriminating against white people with diversity policies, and he tweeted that he hopes young people will carry on Charlie Kirk’s legacy.
If one or two of these things happened in isolation, I could maybe understand giving him the benefit of the doubt as a non-American (for that last one) non-native English speaker. But all of these things taken together? I personally don’t think I can look past that.
To be fair I hadn’t heard of some of these, so I think you’re right. I wouldn’t go so far as as to say he’s a white supremacist but it definitely seems like he has an “ideology”
Edit: The more I read about it the more it’s pissing me off. Especially defending DHH who wrote that trash article about London (I’m not a Londoner but I’m a Brit who’s there enough with work to know he’s talking absolute shit).
That’s fair, I assume most people probably aren’t following ladybird that closely so it’s easy to miss. It just bothers me because shrugging off small individual problems and ignoring a bigger trend is arguably what let people like DHH get a platform in the first place.
Google’s monopoly is a bigger problem than one guy having confused ideas, to me.
One could just hard-fork Chromium…
Go on, do it.
Came here to say this.
Sloppybird
Andreas Kling’s ladybird? Don’t wanna touch that with a 10ft pole.
https://hyperborea.org/reviews/software/ladybird-inclusivity/
Hyperborea.org is that owned by a racist or is the domain ment to be making fun of it?
Based on the content of that article alone (especially near the bottom), I don’t think it’s run by a racist at all. Can confirm via their social media presence.
Weird. I would not feel comfortable using that domain. I thought i was reading a neo Nazis blog on the issue.
Can you explain why you feel that way? “Hyperborea” is not a term I’m familiar with vis a vis Nazism.
Its a very common meme with neo Nazis and white nationalists. They are the only ones I see mention hyperborea. This explains the usage if you skip over the explanation of what hyperborea is https://knowyourmeme.com/sensitive/memes/hyperborea
Sigh of course it’s a Nordic thing. I should have guessed. White nationalists also love other Heathen/Norse symbolism.
Good to be careful, so thanks for educating me.
The author explains why he chose the name on his site. I don’t think this is a neo-nazi / white nationalist thing despite the irony.
Yeah he picked it back in 2000s and its aged badly. Not his fault
Thanks for the reference!
If any creator can separate work from personal and the product is good I really couldn’t care less with what they use their own time for.
I’m pretty sure you could find people with other unsavoury opinions in the devteams for both chrome and firefox, what then? Lynx?
Rest in peace to this browser.
I would of course love to see ladybird succeed, but it has seemed problematic from the start in my opinion. Servo seems much more serious.
I also like that Servo is developing an engine, not a browser as such. Seems like a good idea to keep the two separated.
Oh. Welp, if it’s going to be vibe coded I’m out.
Guess I got excited about this browser for nothing.
Birdpoop browser you say? Never heard of of it.
I was enthusiastic about this project. But I am afraid these recent tangents will only reduce momentum.
The worst part is they are doing themselves a disservice by not rewriting it by hand - have they really learnt enough Rust to know how to effectively rewrite the other parts of the engine as they say? Doubtful - they’ll probably just do everything through AI stuff going forward.
Good grief, the irrational ai kneejerk hate in this community is insane. This seems like a perfect use case - a code base with good test coverage and well defined output expectations, where a human has guided the translation and checked the results. The human in question has saved a lot of time. And still all the comments are “hurr durr slop amirite”. SMH fucking head.
Nah.
no u
yeah, this part of the community is as insufferable as the overly enthusiastic vibe coders
And the people complaining about “insufferable” critics of AI, and assuming all criticism is “knee-jerk”, are themselves contributing to the cycle of negativity.
no shit, pick any post that mentions AI here and see who are the first ones to comment every single time.
If you don’t want a “cycle of negativity”, maybe let’s not throw rocks at anything for just bringing up the topic?
how’s acknowledging this herd behavior contributing to it. Some of us are also tired of reading the same crap in the comments.
Hes not even using the rust part either. Its still using c++. It’s just being developed on the side.
I think it’s important to note that human review is not = quality always, it’s case by case and a lot of times the nuance and potential problems don’t appear until the code has been fiddled with manually in my experience.
Basically saying that it depends on how it was used, but my hunch is using AI for new languages for production use without an expert to help is a bad use case since the new comer has no idea what nuances exist. Unless that’s not the case here
I’ve suddenly lost all interest in this browser’s development. From what I’ve heard, LLMs are pretty bad at generating Rust code for some reason. If they used LLM to bulk convert C++ code to Rust, the quality of the code is questionable at best.
Surely you read the article?
"The requirement from the start was byte-for-byte identical output from both pipelines. "
The bytecode from C++ is identical to the Rust output.
~~I don’t think it’s possible to write rust code that compiles to the exact same binary as c++. compilers make different optimizations, and make overall a different structure, especially across languages.
I think they meant the rust library produces the same output from the same input as the c++ library.~~
if llms indeed generate worse rust code than for other languages, that’s not that big of a problem because the compiler will catch a lot of mistakes. if it compiles, it will run, and no memory safety bugs unless unsafe is also used. the llm could pick the wrong functions for some uses, but that should be caught relatively easily with testing, which can be automated partly
edit: I was wrong, they indeed say that. this is weird.
Gross
@Beep@lemmus.org @technology@lemmy.world
Ah, the smell of irony by the morning! Adopting a programming language often praised by its “safety”, while the entire pretension of “safety” is alchemically transmuted into a sewage and deliberately flushed up (not down) by a clanker who drinks from the cesspool with the same determination and thirst that of a Chevy Opala gurgling down entire Olympic pools worth of gasoline.
Being serious now, the foreseeable future for Web browsing is definitely depressing: Chromium needs no introduction (used to be an interesting browser until Google’s mask “don’t be evil” fell and straightforwardly revealed their corporate face and farce), Firefox have been “welcoming the new AI overlords” for a while, text browsers (such as Lynx) are far from feasible for a CAPTCHA(and Anubis)-driven web… now, one of the latest and fewest glimmers of hope, an alternative Web browser engine, is becoming the very monster the fight against which was promised to be the launchpad purpose (“They who fights with monsters should be careful lest they thereby become a monster”). I wouldn’t be surprised if Servo were to enshittify, too. Being able to choose among the sameness is such a wonderful thing, isn’t it?
I mean, I’m not the average Lemmy user who got this (understandably) deep hatred against AI, I am able to hold a nuanced view and finding quite interesting uses (especially when it comes to linguistics) for the clankers (especially the “open-weighted” ones). However, this, to shoving AI everywhere and using AI to “code for you”, it’s a whole different story. A software should be programmed in the way programming (as posited by Ada Lovelace) was intended to, not “vibe coded” by a fancy auto-completer who can’t (yet) deal with Turing completeness, especially when it comes to a whole miniature operational system that browsers became nowadays. When coding a whole OS, AI shouldn’t even be touched by a two million light-years pole, let alone by a two-feet pole.
Why leave WebKit out?
@paraphrand@lemmy.world @technology@lemmy.world
Oh, right, WebKit, I forgot mentioning it, thanks for reminding me of it!
It’s the engine I likely used the least throughout my digital existence. I mean, I likely used Lynx more than I used WebKit, hence my forgetfulness.
However, if we’re talking about the WebKit-based Linux browsers (such as Konqueror), IIRC, they’re a bit out of spec when it comes to the “modern Web”: WebKit’s adoption of latest specs tends to be slower than Firefox and Chromium.
Now, if we’re talking about Safari specifically, then… it’s part of Apple’s walled garden, one where even “Firefox from App Store” is actually a reskinned Safari (at least in iOS).
Be it Safari or Konqueror, deep inside, the WebKit engine seems to me like the “Apple’s Chromium”, so mentioning WebKit doesn’t really improve the awful prospect for browser engines that we’re facing nowadays.
However, if we’re talking about the WebKit-based Linux browsers (such as Konqueror), IIRC, they’re a bit out of spec when it comes to the “modern Web”: WebKit’s adoption of latest specs tends to be slower than Firefox and Chromium.
WebKit-GTK is up to date. 30 seconds of research in your favorite search engine and you would have found it out.
@woelkchen@lemmy.world @technology@lemmy.world
It takes the same 30 seconds of using caniuse.com (screenshot below), which doesn’t list WebKit-GTK specifically, but lists Safari (which is WebKit under the hood), for it to become clear how many things are missing from Safari implementation (which is WebKit).
To be fair, yes, there are many bleeding edge features, some of them implemented only on WebKit/Safari, but those Safari-only features are kind of proprietary features (prefixed by
-webkit-). Similarly, there are indeed many features still missing from Firefox while already implemented for the two other engines (such as CSS@function).But my point, which I should’ve gone into further detail earlier, is that WebKit, primarily maintained by Apple (originally authored by Apple, and a trademark of Apple since 2013), doesn’t have the same, browser-focused teams found on Mozilla (whose main product is Firefox) and Google (whose main product is advertisement through their platforms, including Chrome, so Chrome is part of their main focus just because that’s essential to keep the ads running and telemetry sneaking on the user). Apple is more focused on other businesses, such as hardware and UI, Safari and WebKit are their side-project.
Chromium needs no introduction (used to be an interesting browser until Google’s mask “don’t be evil” fell and straightforwardly revealed their corporate face and farce), Firefox have been “welcoming the new AI overlords” for a while, text browsers (such as Lynx) are far from feasible for a CAPTCHA(and Anubis)-driven web…
To me the hope lies in Firefox forks
@INeedMana@piefed.zip @technology@lemmy.world
Yeah, me too. Unfortunately, the forks can only get so far in removing upstream AI garbage and other proprietary/corporate-oriented whistles-and-bells. If, say, some AI feature becomes so ingrained inside Firefox upstream, so deeply it ends up becoming some hard dependency for fundamental functioning of the browser (i.e. a feature that, if removed at the code-level, would render Firefox simply unable to function), no WaterFox, IronFox, Fennec or LibreWolf would be able to keep up with the latest versions: they’d either need to do a hard fork trying to independently maintain an entire codebase for a browser, or they’d need to use downgraded versions.
Not even to say about licensing shenanigans. We’ve seen many open-source projects suddenly changing their licensing to include legalese thin letters. We’ve seen open-source projects requiring developers to sign up some kind of NDA before being allowed to contribute with code. Seems like initially-open licenses aren’t written on stone when it comes to big projects, and Firefox is a big project.
The universe of open-source software is being slowly hijacked by corporate interests. This is not different with Firefox, which (as I said in another reply to someone in this thread a few minutes ago) is Mozilla’s main product (if not the main product, it’s certainly among their main projects). The same Mozilla which has been pivoting to AI (e.g. acquisition of Anonym; subtle phrasing changes from “About Firefox” page which used to state how “Firefox will never sell your data”, now this phrase is gone).
I use WaterFox on a daily basis. It’s by far the best browser I’ve been using. I tried LibreWolf but it doesn’t really likes my Portuguese ABNT2 keyboard (which has accents I use often), even after disabling ResistFingerprint, so I ended up sticking with WaterFox. On mobile, I use Fennec on a daily basis, and I’m worried about the end of “sideloading” on Android which will likely mess with its installation. But I’m aware of how both browsers rely on upstream code from Mozilla Firefox, whose enshittification is already an ongoing phenomenon. And that’s really depressing when it comes to the future of browser landscape, because we’re hoping for a true alternative. Servo is the last bastion of said hope (until it gets EEE’d by corporate interests, given how Linux Foundation itself is increasingly surrounded by corpos.
I’m more of a GNU/Stallman person who values autonomy and libreness as non-negotiable principles. I’m only using Android because I’m stuck with it due to certain societal impositions (banks and gov apps), otherwise I’d be long using a custom phone, which wouldn’t even be Linux, but something way more “unorthodox” for a phone such as FreeBSD or Illumos/OpenIndianna, systems of which I already used on a PC environment and got quite fond of.
We’ve seen open-source projects requiring developers to sign up some kind of NDA before being allowed to contribute with code.
you mean the DCOs? those are nothing like NDAs. if not, which ones you mean?
@WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works @technology@lemmy.world
Possibly. I don’t know the specific acronym they use, but regardless of the acronym: to me, it smells and looks like NDAs insofar it’s some kind of analogous version of a “secretive initiation ritual” for a developer who’s just trying to help an open-source community. It’s an agreement where the developer accepts that anything they contribute free-of-charge is going to be used for enterprise (paid) purposes and any contribution is subject to be altered or removed as the management pleases, sometimes it also involves literal NDA if private (often “enterprise/premium edition”) repos are intertwined with the open-source (“community edition”) repos.
The ideal open-source, at least to me, would require a developer, any developer no matter who they are or how long their experience is, whenever they wanted to contribute with their coding skills, to simply do a PR or fork a repo, with no bureaucratic or “selling the soul to the Great Corporate” requirements for doing so.
Developing is already mentally demanding for a developer, and adding licensing shenanigans to the equation only complicates things, because now the developer, who’s used to talk the language of computers, would need to become knowledgeable about ambiguous social cues, corporate legalese and the differences between a “MIT” and a “GPL” (that’s one of the main reasons why I’m quite fond of WTFNMFPL licensing: no legalese).
