What'd be the effect of Swift be on the possibility of a Windows port? I know anything end user friendly is ages away, but I don't live in Apple land, and neither does most of the world. Apple has a monopoly on iOS and huge market share on Mac, and is still at 20% or something.
Re:Pwning the Ladybird Browser
by circl_lastname on Thursday May 01, 2025 @10:45AM
(#43858361)
The core Swift Lang has is being made more independent of Apple, and can be compiled for an increasing number of platforms thanks to the LLVM-based compiler
You can even build swiftUI apps without opening Xcode at all nowadays (albeit no code signing)
which is great.
I never learned swift but I can add features easily now or create 1-day projects using swiftUI that makes great macOS native UI's.
Re:Pwning the Ladybird Browser
by the_mitsuhiko on Thursday May 01, 2025 @10:58AM
(#43858524)
I'm honestly not at all familiar with browsers but I really do wonder if a custom language wouldn't be a reasonable tradeoff. It's not all that insane as that is a path that has been walked before. For instance FoundationDB has their own syntax to manage their actor system which just transpiles to C++: https://github.com/apple/foundationdb/blob/main/flow/README....
V8 also has torque which I think to some degree also fits into that type of mindset.
Re:Pwning the Ladybird Browser
by davidgerard on Thursday May 01, 2025 @08:26PM
(#43864905)
> I'm honestly not at all familiar with browsers but I really do wonder if a custom language wouldn't be a reasonable tradeoff.
careful, last time someone said that we got Rust
Out of curiosity, why not C# at this point? It's pretty hard to marry C++ with a high-performant garbage collector, since underlying language semantics does not allow for e.g. compacting GCs.
Re:Pwning the Ladybird Browser
by qingcharles on Friday May 02, 2025 @12:32AM
(#43866224)
What makes Swift a better choice than C#?
C# is more platform independent. Has a well-tested GC.
We're working on integrating with Swift, but despite the team's earnest efforts, Swift/C++ interop is still young and unstable.
On a personal note, I'm increasingly feeling like "C++ with a garbage collector" might actually be a reasonable tool for the task at hand. Watching the development of Fil-C in this space..