> However, now that Ladybird has forked and become its own independent project, all constraints previously imposed by SerenityOS are no longer in effect. We are actively evaluating a number of alternatives and will be adding a mature successor language to the project in the near future. This process is already quite far along, and prototypes exist in multiple languages.

Andreas has looked deeply into moving both SerenityOS and Ladybird to a successor language but at the time didn't find anything out there that met their requirements so he started a new language named Jakt which unfortunately never got enough traction to move to.

One of the issues preventing them from adopting a language like Rust or Swift was the large number of 3rd party dependencies they would bring with them, this went against the "we build everything from scratch" ethos of SerenityOS. Now that Ladybird is forked from Serenity I hope they can revisit this decision.

It wouldn't surprise me if they adopt Swift. Andreas really liked it and in the time since it was last evaluated Swift's C++ interop has improved a lot.

Isn't it possible to write memory-safe code in modern C++?

Very. In fact it’s becoming harder to write non-safe c++.

Stuff like nullptr has been in the spec for a while, unique_pointer and other stuff has worked its way in too.

And Rust has plenty of ways to turn memory into Swiss cheese. Anyone who does not actively acknowledge unsafe and the fact you can embed C into rust is delusional.

> It's becoming harder to write non-safe c++.

It's becoming harder if you understand those features and use them correctly, on top of your knowledge of unsafe C++. Even then those are opt in, and it still takes a tremendous effort. I don't trust anyone using C++ correctly. It's just hubris at this point. You can use unsafe and call C but that's a smaller surface area to audit. Most big companies are transitioning to Rust for a reason. Some big companies were trying to replace C++ even before Rust was a thing.

Why make a C++ browser now? What's the point?

part of the reason Ladybird split from SerenityOS was to break the "no dependencies" requirement...Ladybird will now be integrating with best-of-breed third party libraries. These will be primarily C/C++ authored I assume, so you are getting C/C++ no matter what.

In Rust most function take a reference to its argument, which means the ownership is shared. However, you can also pass non-reference to it which indicate that you wish to transfer ownership to the function (of course the caller must be the previous owner). Once the function take ownership there's no way to take it out unless they returned it, so it achieve the effect you're looking for.

I heard some HTTP library used that to expose a state machine, so functions that cause HTTP header to be sent will take ownership and return a new value which no longer expose HTTP headers setter methods.

For freeing memory or resources, the recommended way to do it is in RAII-style, with custom Drop implementation that will get called when the ownership is dropped instead of explicit close() or free()

I am not sure I really agree with your first paragraph, but the function you’re talking about is https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/mem/fn.drop.html

I am also not sure what that has to do with anything, to be honest with you, but I’d be happy to elaborate if you will!