Indeed, and as a school those 18 months are well worth it, but it is in many ways also 18 months wasted. There is a strong sense of NIH with the Ladybird dev(s), and I wonder if that isn't their whole reason for doing this.
I've seen another team doing something similar, they went through endless rewrite cycles of a major package but never shipped, and eventually the project was axed when they proposed to do it all over again, but this time even better.
> Indeed, and as a school those 18 months are well worth it, but it is in many ways also 18 months wasted.
the thing for me is (and maybe i've missed something?) but if after 18 months of struggle i'd really like to get a more insightful blog post* that goes into detail about what exactly failed and the process that lead to it... as a language enthusiast i think getting valuable lessons/reflections would be cool (was the cause swift c++ iterop progressing too slow? or some other technical hurdle? was there politics involved? etc etc)
* of course i'm just an internet person, i don't deserve anything from anybody ^^
The sense of NIH is from Serenity, and that was probably the reason for Jakt's existence too. Now it's spun off into its own project there is a lot more pragmatism.
Well, here's to hoping because we really need a stand-in for FF. I realize the irony here in terms of that being the ultimate 'NIH' project but that one I can get behind because the browser landscape is much too fragile. Of course they might end up taking users away from FF rather than from Chrome, Edge or Safari.
In case you didn't know they're using a lot of third-party libraries now for pretty major things: libcurl for http, Skia/Harfbuzz for rendering, libxml, OpenSSL, ffmpeg, etc:
