Andreas Kling aka @awesomekling wrote:
We’ve been evaluating a number of C++ successor languages for @ladybirdbrowser , and the one best suited to our needs appears to be @SwiftLang 🪶
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!
Why do we like Swift?
First off, Swift has both memory & data race safety (as of v6). It’s also a modern language with solid ergonomics.
Something that matters to us a lot is OO. Web specs & browser internals tend to be highly object-oriented, and life is easier when you can model specs closely in your code. Swift has first-class OO support, in many ways even nicer than C++.
The Swift team is also investing heavily in C++ interop, which means there’s a real path to incremental adoption, not just gigantic rewrites.
Strong ties to Apple?
Swift has historically been strongly tied to Apple and their platforms, but in the last year, there’s been a push for “swiftlang” to become more independent. (It’s now in a separate GitHub org, no longer in “apple”, for example).
Support for non-Apple platforms is also improving, as is the support for other, LSP-based development environments.
What happens next?
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!
No language is perfect, and there are a lot of things here that we don’t know yet. I’m not aware of anyone doing browser engine stuff in Swift before, so we’ll probably end up with feedback for the Swift team as well.
I’m super excited about this! We must steer Ladybird towards memory safety, and the first step is selecting a successor language that we can begin adopting very soon. 🤓🐞
Your comment convinced me to finally take a look at his profile and see what the fuss is about.
I didn’t see anything that’d make me scream fascism, either.
But there’s definitely stuff that’s off. Things that, in isolation, would be one thing, but when you analyze them all together, it wouldn’t be weird to say there’s a pattern. A picture starts to form, and it’s one that I’ve sadly seen many times before.
So I went back and grabbed a few tweets:
I barely had to scroll to find these, they’re all recent. There’s much more.
Individually, you could dismiss everything. It’s just humor. He’s neutral. Objective. Wholesome. But then, why does he keep hitting the same keys? You’d assume a wholesome centrist would have a little more variety in their stand-up routine.
You know what he reminds me of, after reading so many of his tweets?
People who dress up in a veneer of positivity, but you ask them what they think is negative, and they’ll say things like raising awareness of LGBT issues. Not in those words, of course, because that’s not positive. When they talk about it, they’ll put on this show about how they don’t take sides, and how they’re simply worried about the technical discussion, the actually important stuff, you know? They simply don’t like unhelpful noise, things like trying to foster an inclusive community.
It’s easy to seem like a positive figure when you never properly acknowledge any criticism. Position yourself as a factual, neutral voice of objectivity, even when that’s literally impossible. Present those who disagree as non-contributing, unproductive, negative noise-makers. Say you agree with people on topics they care about, but then turn around and tell them they’re all doing it wrong. Cover it all up in emoji and a “Let’s do it together!” attitude, but reject anyone who reaches out with the wrong greeting.
And there you have it, Andreas reads like a man who’s either lying to himself or to others, and I don’t know which is worse.
I went into this thinking, “I have to avoid baselessly criticizing people. There’s surely nuance to this man’s real beliefs, people on the internet are too quick to attack without evidence.” Which is why I’m honestly surprised to say that I came out with a mildly worse opinion of Andreas than when I started. What the hell.
I sincerely hope he can reflect on his behavior and grow out of this strange mindset. Andreas seems to be a great software developer and Ladybird can be an enormous boon for the web, so it hurts to see him acting this way.
Again, I genuinely don’t think he’s on Twitter because he’s a “weird fascist tech bro” who likes a fascist platform (what is even meant by weird?). I find it more probable that he’s comfortable there, realizes that it’s not going anywhere, that it remains the most popular platform, and therefore doesn’t think Mastodon is worth the effort.
Why he’s so comfortable there and doesn’t like Mastodon is worth considering, though.
This is literally the text from one of the links above that assert that Andreas is a fascist:
“I’m doing my best to build something I believe in, and everyone is welcome to participate as long as we can set our differences aside.
”
I cannot imagine how lopsided your world-view needs to be to interpret this kind of neutrality as “fascist”.
The only conclusion that I can draw is that some people are so polarized ( black and white ) that they can only interpret people that are not “with” them as “against” them.
And to clarify “with” above means “shares my extreme views and expectations”.
If that is true, it is tragically sad.