Really really hope these guys get a foothold in the market. I'm a decades long Firefox user but even I have to admit things with Mozilla aren't looking bright so projects like this are the only things that can save us from the chrome clone wars.
You guys are hugely on fire. Who would have thought someday a new engine rises in this climate, and then who would have thought it would be a small team, without a trillion dollar giant behind them pouring hundreds of millions into its production? This is truly one of the greatest things I have seen in my lifetime.
> Who would have thought someday a new engine rises in this climate, and then who would have thought it would be a small team, without a trillion dollar giant behind them pouring hundreds of millions into its production?
Anybody who has ever worked on a large enterprise software team. Anybody who has ever worked in this scenario will believe this. Computing history is full of 2-10 people teams beating giant well funded teams to the punch.
This mostly occurs because work expands to fill the time and resources allowed for the project (Parkinson's Law), and large companies have almost unlimited amounts of both.
Compile it yourself (it takes 15-20 minutes to fully compile) and test it on a website. Compare it to Firefox or Chrome and see what's wrong. Fix it and submit a PR.
Unfortunately for c++, the industry is moving towards Rust. Even conservative gray-suit Corps are using rust for their new projects. The limiting factor is available rust devs. Writing c++ is a sure way to get hired maintaining a legacy codebase.
Ladybird is an outlier and there are probably a few more project like it, but anyone looking to be employed should pick up the new skill that is rust. Contribute to ladybird and learn c++ if the project interests you, but don't learn it for a career.
Out of curiosity, where are you located where large companies are desperately trying to snap up every available Rust developer? Everywhere I've looked, the few Rust job postings I've seen have mainly been from cryptocurrency startups. All of the non-crypto Rust job postings I've seen are from companies trying to get experts in a particular niche. Must have 8 years of Linux kernel development experience plus 3 years of Rust experience, must have 5 years of network driver development experience plus 4 years of Rust experience, that sort of thing. Even including crypto startups, I see far more C++ jobs than Rust jobs.
You may live in a bubble. Rust is great and all but C++ is still dominant in its space. The web browser you're using right now? C++. The OS you're using? Probably some unholy mixture of C and C++. Console and computer games? Written in C++ as a rule.
Working on a major new project right now in C++. In our case, it’s a high performance 2D GPU accelerated drawing application - C++ and many of its battle hardened/established libs are the only game in town. Rust is a non-starter for a large range of apps
The industry is not moving to Rust. There are projects here and there, but mostly for safety critical code and other situations where it makes sense, see chromium and Windows kernel. I don't know any major project stopping active development in C++ and switching to Rust instead.
I don't understand the hate towards C++. Many of the aspects criticized for are non-issues in modern C++. I am not to knowledgable about Rust, but what reason is there to use Rust? Memory safety isn't much of a problem in C++ anymore with smart pointers, std::move. Implicit typing exists in C++ with std::auto. Functional programming with lambda, std::functional, std::map, etc. C++ does everything I have wanted it to do, has a huge ecosystem of libraries, and great tools.
> Memory safety isn't much of a problem in C++ anymore with smart pointers, std::move.
Of course it is! You can still access an object after std::moving it somewhere, return references to local stack variables from functions, double-delete (or zero!), use uninitiated variables and do bunch of other things that rightfully caused notoriety C++ has got. And am saying it as someone who writes C++ every workday, unfortunately.
> The limiting factor is available rust devs. Writing c++ is a sure way to get hired maintaining a legacy codebase.
Anyone looking to be extremely employable in this market should really learn both.
Otherwise, you are not going to see a migration to Rust from C++ shops at all.
> Ladybird is an outlier and there are probably a few more project like it. but anyone looking to be employed should pick up the new skill that is rust.
Then I suggest you prepare for Leetcode hards on Rust code, if you want to show that you are highly experienced in solving DSA problems that are found in systems software.
Also, why does Ladybird get a pass and the others don't?
On Twitter, Andreas points out that his Keynote Presentation on the Ladybird Browser on the FUTO conference in Texas earlier in the year, might be the best current introduction to the project:
120Hz limit for high refresh rate support seems strange. The most common refresh rate for high refresh rate monitors is 144Hz, and faster refresh rates are available. If you run a 120fps animation on a 144Hz monitor you'll get duplicated frames, which negates a large part of the benefit.
My first thought was that this was done with consideration for mobile phones, since many higher-end models use 120 Hz displays, but Ladybird does not seem to support mobile for now.
> Websites using requestAnimationFrame now render at up to 120Hz on supported hardware
But the phrasing of it about "can now" suggests to me that this may simply be a performance issue too. They changed it from 60 to 120. Perhaps in the future they can go from 120 to 144 or even 240.
Interesting whether guys employ LLM to speed up development. Starting a new browser just like this would be very bold decision like 15 years ago, now seems like a reasonable thing to do actually.
Starting a new browser, using LLMs... Is not going to maintain enough context.
Whilst Andreas does use Copilot a fair bit [0], he tends to do a line at a time, frequently disagree and rewrites his own, before prompting again. That is... He basically uses it as a fancy autocomplete. Not much else.
Would have to be at the hands of an already skilled practitioner. Average Joe programmer setting out to build a browser with Copilot will end badly. Big-picture architecture and discipline is too important with this level of complexity.
I haven't watched the VODs myself but I am curious as to the nature of the Copilot use - is it a fancy autocomplete, a 2nd look at code he's already written, or is it generating large parts of the code?
The SerenityOS project literally has "NIH syndrome" at its core ["the SerenityOS project, which has a strong culture of writing everything from scratch.", https://ladybird.org/#faq] so I would expect a degree of skepticism of AI code generation.
But there was the post semi-recently about Cloudflare developers shipping a mostly-AI-generated software, overseen by real devs [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44159166] Perhaps Andreas' use of Copilot is a similar thing, where he saves keystrokes and finds errors in the generated output with his own experience. I'll go watch some VODs.
Most of it was written without LLMs for that reason, but now Ladybird is its own project, the NIH focus has largely gone away. They are using a lot of third party code now. Their mission is compete with Chrome, not be 100% NIH.
A comment that could apply to anything. Notice how nobody except for your subthread here is talking about AI. This thread is not about AI or LLMs, for a good reason.
they’re downvoting you, but the developer actually uses copilot a lot in his development videos. why are people so up in arms?
of course, he’s a very, very proficient developer and a browser specialist. he’s not just vibecoding, like you might be implying. but he also uses llms for development.
Because it's bad enough (for those of us that aren't heavily invested in the topic) that often 50%+ of the frontpage is about AI now, to go into the comments for a clearly non-AI topic and see a bunch of "but what about LLMs" comments really just sucks the fun out of HN for a lot of us.
It is so amazing and wholesome to see a huge team of people come together and just collaborate on something they are passionate about and seriously believe in. I'm very hopeful that Ladybird will get to the point where we can use it as a main browser.
Compile it yourself (it takes 15-20 minutes to fully compile) and test it on a website. Compare it to Firefox or Chrome and see what's wrong. Fix it and submit a PR.
You forgot the enormous learning curve of understanding how browsers work and how to write proper code in Ladybug that doesn't waste the maintainers´ time.
Last time I tried, I couldn't find a website that worked with it. Where do you even begin contributing to such a large, complex, very much WIP project? The barrier to entry is daunting.
- you don't need to understand the whole in order to help
the kind of bugs you can start with are like :
- this icon is a bit weird, it's off centre by 2px - how do I add 2 pixels to this icon? either by moving it or by changing the underlying image asset? if I'm moving it, what is the subroutine that paints it? if I'm changing the image asset itself, where is it stored? (is it in a packed store? or is it just a plain file, etc)
- when I click this button, trace the pathway - it's supposed to add to history and turn blue. is it doing that?
etc.
For large projects, start super small and work your way out from there.
>Last time I tried, I couldn't find a website that worked with it.
That was the case for me last time I tried it as well, which was a few months ago. Tried it again yesterday and I could load many pages. Could even render complex real life pages like YouTube.
I recommend anyone to build it themselves. It is a very simple and smooth experience.
I did actually watch a friend compile and run it, and we tried it on a couple of simple web pages and were impressed with the results!
However, there are two barriers to me building it myself and submitting PRs. The first is that it's not officially supported to build or run on Windows, so I'd have to get familiar with WSL first or set up a dual-boot environment.
The second is that it's written in the obsolete and unusable language of C++. I would have loved an opportunity here to get into Rust or something, but C++ has proven itself hazardous to my mental health, so I'm staying away from it.
I love Rust, but I do not like how people are rust evangelists and look down on everything else. That is not how we in the Rust community look at things.
Now, with that out of the way.
Andreas has been very clear about the reasons why C++ is the chosen language.
He has years of experience with it along with writing browsers.
Im paraphrasing here, but he has said that the web evolved around the era of OOP and C++ is the OOP language of that era. Including statements on how C++ fits nicely with the OOP styles of web specs.
I don't know which bubble you are in, but C++ is nowhere near obsolete status. As much as want Rust to be adopted widely, that still hasn't happened, despite small-scale effort to sprinkle it in various projects.
For the WSL part: that's one command in powershell/cmd and then a download from the Microsoft store. You won't find it challenging, there's not much more to it than that in 99% of cases (and if you do run into issues, there are probably better alternatives to trying to fix WSL anyway).
As for C++, Ladybird uses very modern C++ that makes it substantially easier to write reasonably safe code than the C++ of yore.
Still, as much as I would like to see the world move to safer languages, C++ is everywhere. Every major browser is written in it. It's not "unusable" in the slightest (though I certainly understand not wanting to learn C++ as an outsider at this point in time, it's a quite boring language in comparison and the C++ job market probably won't let you make use of modern language features that might make it interesting).
I would love to live in a world where projects with security risks like web browsers would "just" use Rust instead of C++ but you'll have to convince the people building the browser to spend their own time or their bosses' time to learn Rust first, and that's a tough sell.
There's Servo if you want to contribute to an open source browser in Rust. It looks like it can certainly use the help it you compare its development speed with Ladybird.
> The second is that it's written in the obsolete and unusable language of C++.
Oh come on. There's nicer ways to say "I'm not good at it". It's OK you know, you can't be good at everything. Just don't make it other people's fault.
If you look at it that way, nobody is good at anything. True perhaps but not a very useful stance.
Millions of people have built meaningful software with C++ over the past several decades. It is everywhere and it mostly works OK.
Of course, C++ is not necessarily the best choice for everything or anything. But it is a mostly reasonable choice for lots of things in 2025, just like it was in 1995.
There are different levels of confidence in junior programmers code in different languages. For C++ it is one of the lowest possible.
If thousands of HN readers suddenly decide that they need to start their 10+ years learning of C++ with immediate contribution to the Ladybird project it would be not really helpful, right?
Why Discord though? Truly independent project, keep big corps away, future of the web at stake here yada yada yet using the most walled garden of walled gardens. If there is no publicly accessible and searchable archive then might as well not exist.
SerenityOS used IRC but when Andreas changed to discord he saw a massive influx of developers. I assume that it was a no brainer to use discord when forking Ladybird...
For some reason I can't find the RSS feed for the newsletter; anyone that did who could post it here? I can only find the one for the "announcements"—which seem a lot less relevant to follow the progress of the project.
It's not cleanly one or the other, really. It's UCS-2-y by `str.length` or `str[i]`, but UTF-16-y by `str.codePointAt(i)` or by iteration (`[...str]` or `for (x of str)`).
Generally though JS's strings are just a list of 16-bit values, being intrinsically neither UCS-2 nor UTF-16. But, practically speaking, UTF-16 is the description that matters for everything other than writing `str.length`/`str[i]`.
And most mainstream GUI toolkits are, as well. It can be said that UTF-16 is the de-facto standard in-memory representation of unicode strings, even though some runtimes (Rust) prefer UTF-8.
Why are you guys talking like there were dozens of GUI toolkits in mainstream use? It's basically web stuff, Qt, and then everything else. Web would be UTF-16 as discussed above, Qt is UTF-16, and even if we entertain the admittedly "large just behind-the-scenes" Java/.NET market, that's also all UTF-16. WxWidgets being a fence sitter can do both UTF-8 and UTF-16, depending on the platform.
Which players am I missing? GTK and ImGUI? I don't think they are too big a slices of this pie, certainly not big enough to invalidate the claim.
The power of one, the power of a mind who can’t take no for an answer to the inner voice.
And don’t lecture me about the many, for the many wouldn’t have started it, they joined the one.
You know the one, cherish him.
Thanks!
Really really hope these guys get a foothold in the market. I'm a decades long Firefox user but even I have to admit things with Mozilla aren't looking bright so projects like this are the only things that can save us from the chrome clone wars.
You guys are hugely on fire. Who would have thought someday a new engine rises in this climate, and then who would have thought it would be a small team, without a trillion dollar giant behind them pouring hundreds of millions into its production? This is truly one of the greatest things I have seen in my lifetime.
> Who would have thought someday a new engine rises in this climate, and then who would have thought it would be a small team, without a trillion dollar giant behind them pouring hundreds of millions into its production?
Anybody who has ever worked on a large enterprise software team. Anybody who has ever worked in this scenario will believe this. Computing history is full of 2-10 people teams beating giant well funded teams to the punch.
This mostly occurs because work expands to fill the time and resources allowed for the project (Parkinson's Law), and large companies have almost unlimited amounts of both.
How long until it gets abandoned too?
Here's a guide to help you get started contributing:
https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird/tree/master/Docu...
Here are the latest Web Platform (WPT) tests:
https://wpt.fyi/results/?run_id=6292901677236224
There is a Discord if you want to ask questions:
https://discord.gg/c8JEZkDvtY
Compile it yourself (it takes 15-20 minutes to fully compile) and test it on a website. Compare it to Firefox or Chrome and see what's wrong. Fix it and submit a PR.
how to build Ladybird https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird/blob/master/Docu...
I tried contributing but its too c++-y for me to understand it unfortunately.
This is the way to start learning.
Look at a WPT test and try to focus on it.
Look at the web spec
Ask questions in the Discord about where it would be, and people are gladly willing to help. :)
Unfortunately for c++, the industry is moving towards Rust. Even conservative gray-suit Corps are using rust for their new projects. The limiting factor is available rust devs. Writing c++ is a sure way to get hired maintaining a legacy codebase.
Ladybird is an outlier and there are probably a few more project like it, but anyone looking to be employed should pick up the new skill that is rust. Contribute to ladybird and learn c++ if the project interests you, but don't learn it for a career.
Out of curiosity, where are you located where large companies are desperately trying to snap up every available Rust developer? Everywhere I've looked, the few Rust job postings I've seen have mainly been from cryptocurrency startups. All of the non-crypto Rust job postings I've seen are from companies trying to get experts in a particular niche. Must have 8 years of Linux kernel development experience plus 3 years of Rust experience, must have 5 years of network driver development experience plus 4 years of Rust experience, that sort of thing. Even including crypto startups, I see far more C++ jobs than Rust jobs.
You may live in a bubble. Rust is great and all but C++ is still dominant in its space. The web browser you're using right now? C++. The OS you're using? Probably some unholy mixture of C and C++. Console and computer games? Written in C++ as a rule.
The commenter talked about new projects, why are you talking about the web browser and the OS?
Working on a major new project right now in C++. In our case, it’s a high performance 2D GPU accelerated drawing application - C++ and many of its battle hardened/established libs are the only game in town. Rust is a non-starter for a large range of apps
New games are not made in Rust. Rust has been trying hard and it's going nowhere.
The industry is not moving to Rust. There are projects here and there, but mostly for safety critical code and other situations where it makes sense, see chromium and Windows kernel. I don't know any major project stopping active development in C++ and switching to Rust instead.
I don't understand the hate towards C++. Many of the aspects criticized for are non-issues in modern C++. I am not to knowledgable about Rust, but what reason is there to use Rust? Memory safety isn't much of a problem in C++ anymore with smart pointers, std::move. Implicit typing exists in C++ with std::auto. Functional programming with lambda, std::functional, std::map, etc. C++ does everything I have wanted it to do, has a huge ecosystem of libraries, and great tools.
> Memory safety isn't much of a problem in C++ anymore with smart pointers, std::move.
Of course it is! You can still access an object after std::moving it somewhere, return references to local stack variables from functions, double-delete (or zero!), use uninitiated variables and do bunch of other things that rightfully caused notoriety C++ has got. And am saying it as someone who writes C++ every workday, unfortunately.
There are plenty of embedded projects still being started with c. C++ also has a lot of demand where i am at.
The advice about career is very geography and industry dependent. Almost no one hired Node.js developers in my city back when i started.
I wish I lived in the same world as you.
There's basically 0 rust jobs available that aren't scam startups.
They're likely moving to swift not rust.
> The limiting factor is available rust devs. Writing c++ is a sure way to get hired maintaining a legacy codebase.
Anyone looking to be extremely employable in this market should really learn both.
Otherwise, you are not going to see a migration to Rust from C++ shops at all.
> Ladybird is an outlier and there are probably a few more project like it. but anyone looking to be employed should pick up the new skill that is rust.
Then I suggest you prepare for Leetcode hards on Rust code, if you want to show that you are highly experienced in solving DSA problems that are found in systems software.
Also, why does Ladybird get a pass and the others don't?
[flagged]
On Twitter, Andreas points out that his Keynote Presentation on the Ladybird Browser on the FUTO conference in Texas earlier in the year, might be the best current introduction to the project:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YM7pDMLvr4
120Hz limit for high refresh rate support seems strange. The most common refresh rate for high refresh rate monitors is 144Hz, and faster refresh rates are available. If you run a 120fps animation on a 144Hz monitor you'll get duplicated frames, which negates a large part of the benefit.
My first thought was that this was done with consideration for mobile phones, since many higher-end models use 120 Hz displays, but Ladybird does not seem to support mobile for now.
> Websites using requestAnimationFrame now render at up to 120Hz on supported hardware
But the phrasing of it about "can now" suggests to me that this may simply be a performance issue too. They changed it from 60 to 120. Perhaps in the future they can go from 120 to 144 or even 240.
Maybe the developer that implemented it only had a 120hz display to test it on?
This is such an important project, to keep the big corporations from completely controlling the future of the web.
And it doesn't hurt that Andreas seems to be such a nice, humble guy.
> Andreas seems to be such a nice, humble guy.
Truer words have never been spoken!
His monthly update videos are so soothing to watch.
Interesting whether guys employ LLM to speed up development. Starting a new browser just like this would be very bold decision like 15 years ago, now seems like a reasonable thing to do actually.
Ladybird is 425k LOC. Chromium is 3.5m LOC.
Starting a new browser, using LLMs... Is not going to maintain enough context.
Whilst Andreas does use Copilot a fair bit [0], he tends to do a line at a time, frequently disagree and rewrites his own, before prompting again. That is... He basically uses it as a fancy autocomplete. Not much else.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mxubNQC5O8&t=3099s
Would have to be at the hands of an already skilled practitioner. Average Joe programmer setting out to build a browser with Copilot will end badly. Big-picture architecture and discipline is too important with this level of complexity.
Most of the guys in the LB project don't use LLM's, even though it extremely spec-driven, because C++ is not great with AI for some reason.
But Andreas does fairly heavily, if you watch his code VODs you see that he leans on copilot often.
I haven't watched the VODs myself but I am curious as to the nature of the Copilot use - is it a fancy autocomplete, a 2nd look at code he's already written, or is it generating large parts of the code?
The SerenityOS project literally has "NIH syndrome" at its core ["the SerenityOS project, which has a strong culture of writing everything from scratch.", https://ladybird.org/#faq] so I would expect a degree of skepticism of AI code generation.
But there was the post semi-recently about Cloudflare developers shipping a mostly-AI-generated software, overseen by real devs [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44159166] Perhaps Andreas' use of Copilot is a similar thing, where he saves keystrokes and finds errors in the generated output with his own experience. I'll go watch some VODs.
Most of it was written without LLMs for that reason, but now Ladybird is its own project, the NIH focus has largely gone away. They are using a lot of third party code now. Their mission is compete with Chrome, not be 100% NIH.
With some "Thank you, Copilot"-s sprinkled in to spare him in the robot uprising universe.
A comment that could apply to anything. Notice how nobody except for your subthread here is talking about AI. This thread is not about AI or LLMs, for a good reason.
they’re downvoting you, but the developer actually uses copilot a lot in his development videos. why are people so up in arms?
of course, he’s a very, very proficient developer and a browser specialist. he’s not just vibecoding, like you might be implying. but he also uses llms for development.
Because it's bad enough (for those of us that aren't heavily invested in the topic) that often 50%+ of the frontpage is about AI now, to go into the comments for a clearly non-AI topic and see a bunch of "but what about LLMs" comments really just sucks the fun out of HN for a lot of us.
Because LLMs being a thing now has no bearing on whether it's a good idea or more practical to build a new browser.
It is so amazing and wholesome to see a huge team of people come together and just collaborate on something they are passionate about and seriously believe in. I'm very hopeful that Ladybird will get to the point where we can use it as a main browser.
Compile it yourself (it takes 15-20 minutes to fully compile) and test it on a website. Compare it to Firefox or Chrome and see what's wrong. Fix it and submit a PR.
how to build ladybird https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird/blob/master/Docu...
You forgot the enormous learning curve of understanding how browsers work and how to write proper code in Ladybug that doesn't waste the maintainers´ time.
Last time I tried, I couldn't find a website that worked with it. Where do you even begin contributing to such a large, complex, very much WIP project? The barrier to entry is daunting.
When it comes to larger projects, first:
- you don't need to understand the whole in order to help
the kind of bugs you can start with are like :
- this icon is a bit weird, it's off centre by 2px - how do I add 2 pixels to this icon? either by moving it or by changing the underlying image asset? if I'm moving it, what is the subroutine that paints it? if I'm changing the image asset itself, where is it stored? (is it in a packed store? or is it just a plain file, etc)
- when I click this button, trace the pathway - it's supposed to add to history and turn blue. is it doing that?
etc.
For large projects, start super small and work your way out from there.
Pick a site that almost works on it and then fix it to fully work?
>Last time I tried, I couldn't find a website that worked with it.
That was the case for me last time I tried it as well, which was a few months ago. Tried it again yesterday and I could load many pages. Could even render complex real life pages like YouTube.
I recommend anyone to build it themselves. It is a very simple and smooth experience.
Amazing, going to try it again right now. I had also tried a few months ago.
Why the commanding tone?
English isn't my first language; sorry about that :)
I did actually watch a friend compile and run it, and we tried it on a couple of simple web pages and were impressed with the results!
However, there are two barriers to me building it myself and submitting PRs. The first is that it's not officially supported to build or run on Windows, so I'd have to get familiar with WSL first or set up a dual-boot environment.
The second is that it's written in the obsolete and unusable language of C++. I would have loved an opportunity here to get into Rust or something, but C++ has proven itself hazardous to my mental health, so I'm staying away from it.
I love Rust, but I do not like how people are rust evangelists and look down on everything else. That is not how we in the Rust community look at things.
Now, with that out of the way. Andreas has been very clear about the reasons why C++ is the chosen language. He has years of experience with it along with writing browsers.
Im paraphrasing here, but he has said that the web evolved around the era of OOP and C++ is the OOP language of that era. Including statements on how C++ fits nicely with the OOP styles of web specs.
I don't know which bubble you are in, but C++ is nowhere near obsolete status. As much as want Rust to be adopted widely, that still hasn't happened, despite small-scale effort to sprinkle it in various projects.
For the WSL part: that's one command in powershell/cmd and then a download from the Microsoft store. You won't find it challenging, there's not much more to it than that in 99% of cases (and if you do run into issues, there are probably better alternatives to trying to fix WSL anyway).
As for C++, Ladybird uses very modern C++ that makes it substantially easier to write reasonably safe code than the C++ of yore.
Still, as much as I would like to see the world move to safer languages, C++ is everywhere. Every major browser is written in it. It's not "unusable" in the slightest (though I certainly understand not wanting to learn C++ as an outsider at this point in time, it's a quite boring language in comparison and the C++ job market probably won't let you make use of modern language features that might make it interesting).
I would love to live in a world where projects with security risks like web browsers would "just" use Rust instead of C++ but you'll have to convince the people building the browser to spend their own time or their bosses' time to learn Rust first, and that's a tough sell.
There's Servo if you want to contribute to an open source browser in Rust. It looks like it can certainly use the help it you compare its development speed with Ladybird.
There’s always the option of contributing to Servo if you’re interested in Rust and browser engineering.
Unusable yet people have written a browser in it?
Those are two you-problems.
> The second is that it's written in the obsolete and unusable language of C++.
Oh come on. There's nicer ways to say "I'm not good at it". It's OK you know, you can't be good at everything. Just don't make it other people's fault.
Nobody's good at C++. I've written C++ and even got to the point where I felt I had things under control, but tbh that's just delusion and hubris.
If you look at it that way, nobody is good at anything. True perhaps but not a very useful stance.
Millions of people have built meaningful software with C++ over the past several decades. It is everywhere and it mostly works OK.
Of course, C++ is not necessarily the best choice for everything or anything. But it is a mostly reasonable choice for lots of things in 2025, just like it was in 1995.
There are different levels of confidence in junior programmers code in different languages. For C++ it is one of the lowest possible.
If thousands of HN readers suddenly decide that they need to start their 10+ years learning of C++ with immediate contribution to the Ladybird project it would be not really helpful, right?
Hah, the same could be said about Rust.
And I’d disagree with both.
I'm pretty good at C++.
By using a very simple technique, I've managed to write 0 bugs in it in the past 15 years.
I wonder if Ladybird will ever become a member of the WHAT-WG steering group. It would be nice to see more / any independent voices on there.
I doubt they're as interested in bigco politics as they are in hacking out features.
On the other hand, I think they had a dev or two on TC39. I remember it being mentioned in one of Andreas’ videos (years ago)
Why Discord though? Truly independent project, keep big corps away, future of the web at stake here yada yada yet using the most walled garden of walled gardens. If there is no publicly accessible and searchable archive then might as well not exist.
Would like to hear your suggestion of an alternative that:
* has a modern interface and allow people to communicate effectively
* does not cost a fortune to use
* has good moderation tools
* supports multiple channels
* has enough built-in moderation so that spam/illegal content is minimal
etc.
I think Andreas made a comment about this in some of his videos along the lines of: It's where the most people are.
Because it's chat if you treat it like a knowledge base it's on you.
If that were true than IRC would be absolutely perfect.
SerenityOS used IRC but when Andreas changed to discord he saw a massive influx of developers. I assume that it was a no brainer to use discord when forking Ladybird...
So would be Discord, and so it is.
Come on, it's inevitable that chat history becomes a knowledge base to some extent even if the participants are aware of this pitfall.
Only if you let it.
Andreas has made it clear he’s not interested in free software politics. That’s not his battle
That's fine, but I don't see what free software has to do with searchability and persistence of the backlog
I didn’t say it did. The person I replied to mentioned free software adjacent principles
For some reason I can't find the RSS feed for the newsletter; anyone that did who could post it here? I can only find the one for the "announcements"—which seem a lot less relevant to follow the progress of the project.
https://buttondown.com/ladybird/
If their blog has an RSS feed, that would be great for people who want to follow their work.
What do you even mean "if their blog had a RSS feed"?
The feed is right there in the link being discussed.
They mean that https://ladybird.org/posts.rss only includes "news" (last updated in October 2024) but not "newsletters". In another thread, there is a link to the newsletter archive which can be subscribed to with a feed reader: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44765710
You guys are on fire!
Any news on the usage of Swift?
There are currently a few blockers : https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird/issues/933
Thanks. That looks like nice progress.
Unbelievable process, this guys are crushing it
The web is UTF-16 ? WTF
JavaScript is: https://mathiasbynens.be/notes/javascript-encoding
> The ECMAScript/JavaScript language itself, however, exposes characters according to UCS-2, not UTF-16.
The native JS semantics are UCS-2. Saying that it's UTF-16 is misleading and confuses charset, encoding and browser APIs.
Ladybird is probably implementing support properly but it's annoying that they keep spreading the confusion in their article.
It's not cleanly one or the other, really. It's UCS-2-y by `str.length` or `str[i]`, but UTF-16-y by `str.codePointAt(i)` or by iteration (`[...str]` or `for (x of str)`).
Generally though JS's strings are just a list of 16-bit values, being intrinsically neither UCS-2 nor UTF-16. But, practically speaking, UTF-16 is the description that matters for everything other than writing `str.length`/`str[i]`.
And most mainstream GUI toolkits are, as well. It can be said that UTF-16 is the de-facto standard in-memory representation of unicode strings, even though some runtimes (Rust) prefer UTF-8.
> And most mainstream GUI toolkits are, as well.
No. Windows use UTF-16 internally. Most GUI toolkits do not.
> It can be said that UTF-16 is the de-facto standard in-memory representation of unicode strings, even though some runtimes (Rust) prefer UTF-8.
No, that wouldn't be true at all.
Your technical merit seem to be limited by your Windows experience, and even that is dated.
Microsoft recommends UTF-8 over UTF-16 since 2019 [1].
1: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/design/global...
> Most GUI toolkits do not.
Why are you guys talking like there were dozens of GUI toolkits in mainstream use? It's basically web stuff, Qt, and then everything else. Web would be UTF-16 as discussed above, Qt is UTF-16, and even if we entertain the admittedly "large just behind-the-scenes" Java/.NET market, that's also all UTF-16. WxWidgets being a fence sitter can do both UTF-8 and UTF-16, depending on the platform.
Which players am I missing? GTK and ImGUI? I don't think they are too big a slices of this pie, certainly not big enough to invalidate the claim.
Apple also uses some kind of UTF-16 internally, afaik
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