Comment by TrevorFSmith | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TrevorFSmith | Hacker News Reader

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Hey, ex-Mozillian here. For the old alt OS people, also an ex-NetPositive dev.

With that context, I'm on board with not giving money to Mozilla Corp. Late last year I cancelled my subscriptions to Pocket, the VPN, and recurring donations.

That said, I recommend that you support Servo instead of Ladybird.

Reason #1) C++ is just dumb in 2024 and choosing it is a big red blinking sign that the devs make bad decisions. Now they're considering a rewrite in a better language? So, starting again from scratch... No thanks!

Reason #2) Given the track record of the main author of being an ass to people who aren't willing to be marginalized, I don't have high hopes that he can lead anything as complex as a competitive browser. No, Serenity OS is nowhere near the same level of complexity thanks to el GOOGs insistence that the modern web includes every API found in OSes. Serial port access, really?

Anyway, please don't just jump on a hype train. Fund Servo.

> Reason #1) C++ is just dumb in 2024 and choosing it is a big red blinking sign that the devs make bad decisions. Now they're considering a rewrite in a better language? So, starting again from scratch... No thanks!

Because modern C++ (e.g., using std::unique_ptr with std::make_unique() and RAII wherever possible) is safe enough, is getting safer with each iteration, is easier to learn for someone who already knows C or older (pre-11) variants of C++, and offers greater compatibility with the billions of lines of code already written in C and C++.

> Reason #2) Given the track record of the main author of being an ass to people who aren't willing to be marginalized

I was hesitant to even mention this, but not having to deal with demanding, danger-haired political agitators wielding their CoCs is enough of a reason for me to avoid Rust completely.

> Please don't jump on a hype train

> Give capital to another project because C++ is "dumb" and Rust is not.

I applaud you for disclosing your biases at the top but I was so hoping the disclosure wouldn't be a spoiler for the rest.

> Given the track record of the main author of being an ass to people who aren't willing to be marginalized

That’s a quite strong accusation without any evidence.

How is Servo going these days? I didn't even know that Servo was still active, but judging on the blog (https://servo.org/blog/) it looks like a lot of recent development has been happening. Maybe it would help if Servo had an active browser implementation (beyond the downloadable shell).

Where is said track record of the main author being an ass to people who aren't willing to be marginalized, or anything along those lines?

What's the context for #2?

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