Moving Ladybird from C++ to a safer more modern language is a real differentiator vs other browsers, and will probably pay dividends. Doing it now is better than doing it once ladybird is fully established.
One last point about rewrites: you can look at any industry disruptor as essentially a team that did a from-scratch rewrite of their competitors and won because the rewrite was better.
> I’ve been part of at least 2 successful rewrites. I think that Joel’s post is too often taken as gospel. Sometimes a rewrite is the best way forward.
I can recall recently, listening to an Oxide and Friends podcast where they spent 30 minutes dumping all over "Agile Dev", only to have a very senior, hands-on guy join from AWS and absolutely deliver the smack down. (Personally, I have no positive experiences with Agile Dev, but this guy really stunned the room into silence.) The best part: The Oxide crew immediately recognized the positive experence and backed off the give this guy the space he needed to tell and interesting story. (Hats off the Ox crew for doing that... even if I, personally, have zero love for Agile Dev.)
If you ask me, Go is a better Rust. Rust is an ugly version of C++ with longer compile times and a band of zealous missionaries.
I mean the keywords mut and fn very annoying to read just get rid of them or spell the f*n thing function.
I always wonder how can one come to such a conclusion. Modern C++ has no way to enforce relationship between two objects in memory and the shared xor mutable rule, which means it can't even do the basic checks that are the foundation of Rust's safety features.
Of course, this statement is also trivially debunked by the reality of any major C++ program with complexity and attack surface of something like a browser. Modern C++ certainly didn't save Chrome from CVEs. They ban a bunch of C++ features, enforce the rule of two, and do a bunch of hardening and fuzzing on top of it and they still don't get spared from safety issues.
[1]: https://developer.chrome.com/blog/memory-safety-fonts
[2]: https://github.com/googlefonts/fontations/tree/main/skrifa
What does the memory safety even matter when hackers poison heavily used crates?
The statistics from projects that have adopted Rust and measured the effect say otherwise. See https://security.googleblog.com/2025/11/rust-in-android-move... for example.
Maybe we would see similar effects adopting Modern C++. Maybe not. The article doesn't tell us.
"mut and fn very annoying to read" like okay lol who cares? What should anyone take from your post other than that you aren't that into Rust?
The data says otherwise, three overflows and two UAFs this month in Chrome alone: https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-1224...
Eh. There's a lot I like about Go. I adore its compilation speed and the focus on language simplicity. But its got plenty of drawbacks too. Default nullability is a huge mistake. And result types (zig, swift, rust) are way better than go's error handling. Sum types in general are missing from Go, and once you start using them its so hard to go back. Go also doesn't have anywhere near as good interop with native code. Mixing C (or any other LLVM langauge) with rust is easy and feels great. You even get LTO across the language barrier.
The big thing I'm growing to dislike about rust is how many transitive dependencies a lot of projects end up pulling in. Its very easy to end up with projects that take a million years to compile & produce huge binaries. Not because they do a lot but simply because everything depends on everything, and the dependency tree takes a long time to bottom out. I don't know what the right answer is. It feels more like a cultural problem than a language / ecosystem problem. But I wish rust projects felt as lightweight and small as most C projects I've worked with. I'm doing some work with the stalwart email server at the moment (written in rust). Stalwart is a relatively new, well written email server. But it somehow pulls in 893 transitive dependencies! I'm not even joking. Compiling stalwart takes about 20 minutes, and the compilation process generates several gigabytes of intermediate build assets. What a mess.
20 minutes! What hardware is this on? I've worked on Rust projects with similar numbers of dependencies where the compile time (for a clean release build) was 2-4 minutes (on a MacBook M1 Pro)
- 99% of the ~700 crates were done compiling in about a minute or 2 - RocksDB (a C++ dependency) was 2 minutes by itself - And then it took 10 minutes (ten!) just for the final binary at the end.
That's not normal for Rust code at all. Even large ones like Servo or Rustc or Zed.
UPDATE2: turns out they have LTO enabled by default. Disabling that brings the compile time down to 7 minutes. But that's still really unexpectedly slow.
I definitely agree that it's too slow. I just don't think the cause is "too many dependencies" because I've compiled Rust codebases with twice as many dependencies in half the time!
It seems to produce a 94MB binary. So it may be partly that there are some very big dependencies. But the amount of compilation time that ends up in the top-level crate (even with LTO disabled) also makes me feel like this must be triggering a compiler bug. Either that or using far too many generics.
Not quite. It doesn't have tagged unions, which is what I expect you are thinking of, but it does have sum types.
Go doesn’t have sum types as a first class primitive.
But they're not tagged unions. I expect that is still where your confusion lies. Tagged unions and sum types are not equivalent. Tagged unions are a subset of sum types.
Sum types are a type definition defining something as A or B. Not “anything that quacks like a duck”. But concretely “one of this or one of that”. This enables different syntax, like the match expression to be used, in which you exhaustively list all the variants. The compiler doesn’t need to heap allocate enums because it knows the maximum size of a single value. The compiler and programmer can take advantage of the knowledge that there’s a closed set of values the type can hold. It’s not an open type class.
Result and Option are quite beautiful as sum types. But they’re horrible as type classes. Try implementing them using interface{} in Go. It’s not the same.
But can also define a closed set of types, perfectly satisfying "sum types".
> This enables different syntax, like the match expression to be used, in which you exhaustively list all the variants.
Go does not provide this out of the box, but that is not prerequisite for sum types. The mathematical theory says nothing about "the compiler must produce an error if the user doesn't match call cases". There is sufficient information provided by the sum types if you wish to add this to your build chain yourself, of course.
This argument feels like the “we have sum types at home” meme. Ergonomics matter.
I write a lot of rust. Rust has traits which are similar to Go’s interfaces. But the features aren’t the same, and I use enum all the time. (I also use trait all the time, but I use trait and enum for different things).
AFAIK, tagged union is sum type, based on sum type mathematical definition.
> People need to learn how to use tools properly.
there is a good chance Rust will start dying and will actually die by being replaced by some new hyper-overengineered lang much faster than C++ actually die.
Also CDDA:Bn wouldn't damn need a > 40h long build using 1.5 GB of RAM under an n270 netbook. Ditto with Nchat, FFS, which is worse. A Golang counterpart for nchat as a TG client (and tdlib rewritten in Go) would weight far less while compiling and maybe even the binary itself, and performance wise it would be similar.
I still remember tons of C++ projects from 2005-2009 impossible to compile today but with GCC 4.3 or GCC 4.9, can't remember. Not because of the size, but because C++ incompatible changes over the years. At least tons of C code will compile it today as is modulo some POSIX changes from C code pre 1996. C++ it's something that should died long ago, among stuff like locales under Unix. UTF8 everywhere, use your own currency and the like.
Yeah, I know, game engines, and tons of physics engines and libraries even FLOSS ones such as OGRE, gdal and the like are C++ domain. Still, most of these could be ported to C.
Rarely if ever is anything able to compete simply by being "better". As far as USPs go it's just not enough. I reckon for ladyboy the USP (if any) is going to be it being open and NOT chrome (or derivative). So "safe" "modern" language is not going to mean much to the end users.
What's different today really is the LLMs and coding agents. The reason to never rewrite in another language is that it requires you to stop everything else for months or even years. Stopping for two weeks is a lot less likely to kill your project.
In Ladybird's case, tests they could rely upon.
Ladybird appears to have the discipline to have recognized this: “[Rust] is not becoming the main focus of the project. We will continue developing the engine in C++, and porting subsystems to Rust will be a sidetrack that runs for a long time.”