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I would very much use this browser for everything if I could, just to be different.

That said, I'd prefer if they had used plain C, which is even more portable.

Wait until you realize how much of the bank’s software is written in low level languages like C or C++…

Which is horrible but their Software is behind a firewall at least and not used to execute random code Form the Internet all day

* "lower-level" / "system-level" / "middle-level"

People have done web/mobile banking on Java/Dalvik and ObjC for years. Why would this be an exception?

First, blaming a tool is lazy. While there are problems with C/C++ much of this is due to practices and code complexity. There are tools to help us humans with both of these things. Additionally, do you trust Cython? Why is that (or any other language written in C) better than C? Have you audited that code yourself?

Second, if the developers are as diligent about testing this new browser as they have been with everything else they've done, I would trust it as much as I do Google's Chrome (where I don't trust Google at all) or Apple's Safari (I feel them to be only slightly better than Google).

Third, and perhaps most importantly, if it doesn't work for you that is completely fine. It's not your computer or your data. Why denigrate the project and those who use it or work on it?

yeah, that's why I only surf the internet using the ??? browser

The Chrome or Firefox Browser where literal billions of dollars and hundreds of developers work to ensure the worst fuck ups that follow from being written in C++ are mitigated.

How much is that due to clinging to old standard and legacy ways of doing things? If I look at my own code which tracks recent c++ standard quite aggressively, between c++11 and c++20 some parts of the code have enjoyed more than a 10x reduction due to the better abstractions, which definitely reduces the amount of bugs and development investment needed. I also don't remember the last time I had a memory leak/error that my IDE didn't show me inline to the code while I was typing thanks to clang-analyzer. Ladybird starts from these 2022 best practices - I'd wager it can reach its goals in muuch less time and engineering than it'd take chrome or FF with their (inescapable, no one wants to let good code go) legacy baggage, both social and technical

While this is certainly true, two browsers being written by megacorps doesn't exactly make me eager to use the browsers. I would much much rather use software made by people who are passionate about the project than people who are working on something just clocking in and clocking out.

For those who think Mozilla isn't about money:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation

and this is a hobby project that isn't ready for real world usage anyway, and they're planning to port it to a memory safe language long term. It's not really a fair comparison, and it's not like this is a project with commercial ambitions anyway.

I wonder if it'll stay C++ because of momentum or switch to the aforementioned home grown memory safe Jakt like much of the rest of Serenity is expected to.

This is something I want to know too. C++ certainly has some issues like pretty much every programming language does but in the original article Andreas mentions that he wants to make a cross-platform browser and cross-platform, portable applications is one of the areas where C++ can excel. If they end up switching to Jakt, I fear this will greatly limit the platforms that Ladybird can run on.

Jakt transpiles to C++

That's kind of interesting that it currently transpiles to C++. I have a suspicion though that using C++ as an intermediate language will probably often result in lower performance, higher memory usage, make debugging more complicated, etc... than if it was compiled directly to a lower level language like assembly or LLVM IR. If I'm right about that, those wouldn't be very good characteristics for a programming language that you intend to make a complex web browser in.

In zamadatix's reply to your message he said that C++ is only being used to bootstrap the language and that it's certainly not the plan to require C++ forever. I imagine if Jakt thrives, he will be right and Jakt will probably start compiling into a lower level language instead. If they do target a lower level language though, I imagine this will result in Jakt being less portable than C++ which has been around much longer and is more established.

Only to bootstrap the language, it's certainly not the plan to require that forever.

So what language do you propose they should use?

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