alt Hacker NewsI meant no Swift experts in the Ladybird team. Their expertise is C++, you may think the transition is easy, and it can be pretty painless at first, but true language expertise means knowing how to work around its flaws, and adapting your patterns to its strenghts. Cool for a hobby, but switching language in the middle of an herculean work is suicide.
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WaldoDude • today at 1:18 AM
Oh my bad, I totally misread you. I concur with the point you were actually making!
> switching language in the middle of an herculean work is suicide
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.