I would have preferred Rust, a language created by Mozilla instead of one with ties to Apple, but I’m not a dev so I can’t really judge. What are your thoughts?
Rust was made by Mozilla? TIL
Yep. It was developed to improve parallelization and security of Firefox. Many core parts of Firefox have been replaced with Rust implementations.
I see now. Rust is the color of fox, and foxes eat crabs. It all makes sense now.
Independent of corporate interests
.
Picks one of the few languages created due to corporate interests
This will die on the vine
An interesting choice that is. Picking something like Rust would have benefitted them with a big community of open source enthusiasts that could help with contributions
they explained that they chose it because it is interoperable with their existing C++ code base
But Rust is rather good at that, too, via cxx. Mozilla similarly had a C++ codebase where they wanted to integrate Rust.
Granted, this is raw theory. Maybe Swift is better in practice. But yeah, to me personally, it would need to be massively better to pretty much give up on open-source contributions.
For anyone who knows more about this, how does it compare to Servo? https://servo.org/
servo is a lot further along because they’re not bothering with javascript and are just using spidermonkey. see WPT: https://staging.wpt.fyi/results/?product=servo&product=ladybird
WTF?
I do wonder: why not rust? It would have been amazing. A fast language on par with C++ that also is memory safe. But Swift? You gotta be kidding me…
Swift is a fantastic language and with c++ interop out of the box it’s the obvious choice.
deleted by creator
I’ve read through your links. They don’t have much to do with the codebase itself, but with protecting the trademarks.
From what I read, you’re free to change whatever you want. You just can’t go around using their trademarked names for your modified version.
deleted by creator
That… is not a restriction on freedom 3. You could complain about your inability to use the rust name for anything you want but that is not the same thing as your ability to distribute modified versions of the software. It is also fairly standard practice for foss software to restrict the use of such trademarks. For example, Gnome does pretty much the same thin. FreeBSD as well. Libre Office also has similar restrictions, although they are defined more nebulously. It is not clear to me what usages are allowed with the Linux trademark but they certainly do restrict who can use it and for what and you must get permission before using it. See also, about trademarks in FOSS: https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=9d96e1bf-bced-48f7-b5b4-ee561e7a9348
The software is free. The trademarks are not. The four freedoms are about the software and not about trademarks. You could fork Rust and call it Corrosion, just like people have forked Firefox and called it Waterfox.
There’s a reason why software is being made with Rust now. It has the speed of C++ (sometimes faster), has a nice syntax, is memory safe by default, has the best compiler error messages and also the book is very good. I learnt entirely by the book and it’s very good at explaining things.
