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Comment by rwos | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't call that a "Haskell based browser". 1500 lines of Haskell against maybe 300 KLOC (guessed) of webkit alone. That's not "Haskell based", that's only using Haskell as a glue.

The same goes for uzbl, too, of course. Things like the Grail Browser [1] (a Python webbrowser, including the possibility to run client-side python-code - but sadly obsolete and not maintained anymore, as far as I can tell) are so much cooler than just tying webkit to GTK using $LANGUAGE.

I mean, it's not like HTML layout engines or JS-interpreters are somehow impossible to write from scratch.

[1] http://grail.sourceforge.net/

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> I mean, it's not like HTML layout engines or JS-interpreters are somehow impossible to write from scratch.

Today's web standards are large & complex enough that it is practically impossible without a full-time team.

You could have said the same thing about unix-like operating systems in 1991 - yet, somebody wrote one from scratch without a full-time team.

I'm not trying to put this little project here down, far from it. I think it's pretty neat. I can imagine even neater (if that's a word) things, though... :-)

IMO modern web browser internals are more complex and less fun to work on than 1991-era Unix clones.

I'm not being defensive of this project, I'm being critical of the direction web architecture is going.

>You could have said the same thing about unix-like operating systems in 1991 - yet, somebody wrote one from scratch without a full-time team

Err, at 1991 he just wrote a rudimentary OS from scratch. To make it more unix-like, stable and feature full took hundreds of people, including tens of full time company employees (IBM, RedHat, etc).

This is one of my fears with the complexity explosion called HTML5 / CSS3.

We are bequeathing the future a world where building new browsers is approximately an impossibility.

The Web is so much. Now all devices can consume the same files with comparable user experiences. There are reasonable standards. Javascript is a reasonably advanced and simple language (for the time being). But the web has failed much as well.

Hopefully the web will mature someday and someone will clean up the mess we are leaving them.

> I wouldn't call that a "Haskell based browser". 1500 lines of Haskell against maybe 300 KLOC (guessed) of webkit alone.

WebKit is much bigger than that - at least one order of magnitude bigger (that is, 3 millions of LOC).

So yes, this is a tiny wrapper around a huge C++ codebase. The name is kind of misleading. But still a cool project.

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