Here are some key quotes:
"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."
"So what I’ve done is I’ve asked a bunch of people to “Please implement these things in a couple of different languages. And then we can talk about how that went, what you liked about each language, and which one you would like to work in every day.” And what we ended up with was that people were initially excited to work in Rust, because there’s a lot of hype, and it’s like a popular language… And you would think that it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread… And in many ways it is, if what you want is sliced bread. Or I don’t know where I’m going with that. But it works well for a lot of things."
"But it turns out it’s not ideal for building a browser… Because the browser stack sits on top of this API that was designed in the ’90s, inspired by Java and XML and stuff like that at the time. This ‘90s API, and it set the core of the web stack. And it’s super object-oriented, and it’s just hard to express all that stuff in Rust, because Rust doesn’t lend itself to object-oriented programming. It doesn’t have inheritance, for example, which is a very fundamental building block."
"And so what happened was I asked people to write in Rust, and they were initially excited, and then they came back frustrated. And nobody had a good time working in Rust, as far as I understood, when doing anything but trivial programs that like take an input and transform it into something else. The moment you try to model something, sort of in a browser space, it just became tedious."
"So we looked at some other languages, and the one that everybody has liked so far has been Swift. So it’s a bit of an unlikely candidate, but we decided to look at it, because it is a safe, modern language, that has great object-oriented programming capabilities. I would say it’s even better than C++ in many ways. And it’s a little weird, because it feels like an Apple product almost, but they’ve been making great strides on Linux and Windows. Especially now, the upcoming Swift 6 is looking like it’s going to be a really good release on other platforms as well… So that’s sort of where the ship is pointing right now. We haven’t committed to it, because we’re still figuring out how to do some things, but it’s been really positive, and everybody’s enjoyed working in it, myself included. It’s been fantastic. So that’s sort of what we’re looking at."
alt Hacker News
Found it! It was on a podcast: https://changelog.com/podcast/604
Here are some key quotes: "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."
"So what I’ve done is I’ve asked a bunch of people to “Please implement these things in a couple of different languages. And then we can talk about how that went, what you liked about each language, and which one you would like to work in every day.” And what we ended up with was that people were initially excited to work in Rust, because there’s a lot of hype, and it’s like a popular language… And you would think that it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread… And in many ways it is, if what you want is sliced bread. Or I don’t know where I’m going with that. But it works well for a lot of things."
"But it turns out it’s not ideal for building a browser… Because the browser stack sits on top of this API that was designed in the ’90s, inspired by Java and XML and stuff like that at the time. This ‘90s API, and it set the core of the web stack. And it’s super object-oriented, and it’s just hard to express all that stuff in Rust, because Rust doesn’t lend itself to object-oriented programming. It doesn’t have inheritance, for example, which is a very fundamental building block."
"And so what happened was I asked people to write in Rust, and they were initially excited, and then they came back frustrated. And nobody had a good time working in Rust, as far as I understood, when doing anything but trivial programs that like take an input and transform it into something else. The moment you try to model something, sort of in a browser space, it just became tedious."
"So we looked at some other languages, and the one that everybody has liked so far has been Swift. So it’s a bit of an unlikely candidate, but we decided to look at it, because it is a safe, modern language, that has great object-oriented programming capabilities. I would say it’s even better than C++ in many ways. And it’s a little weird, because it feels like an Apple product almost, but they’ve been making great strides on Linux and Windows. Especially now, the upcoming Swift 6 is looking like it’s going to be a really good release on other platforms as well… So that’s sort of where the ship is pointing right now. We haven’t committed to it, because we’re still figuring out how to do some things, but it’s been really positive, and everybody’s enjoyed working in it, myself included. It’s been fantastic. So that’s sort of what we’re looking at."