Ladybird set to adopt Swift. Andreas Kling on the Ladybird browser project's search for a memory-safe language to use in conjunction with their existing C++ codebase:
Over the last few months, I've asked a bunch of folks to pick some little part of our project and try rewriting it in the different languages we were evaluating. The feedback was very clear: everyone preferred Swift!
Andreas previously worked for Apple on Safari, but this was still a surprising result given the current relative lack of widely adopted open source Swift projects outside of the Apple ecosystem.
This change is currently blocked on the upcoming Swift 6 release:
We aren't able to start using it just yet, as the current release of Swift ships with a version of Clang that's too old to grok our existing C++ codebase. But when Swift 6 comes out of beta this fall, we will begin using it!
Recent articles
- LLM 0.22, the annotated release notes - 17th February 2025
- Run LLMs on macOS using llm-mlx and Apple's MLX framework - 15th February 2025
- URL-addressable Pyodide Python environments - 13th February 2025