alt Hacker NewsLooks like Andreas is a mighty fine engineer, but he's even better entrepreneur. Doesn't matter if intentional or not, but he managed to create and lead a rather visible passion project, attract many contributors and use that project's momentum to detach Ladybird into a separate endeavor with much more concrete financial prospects.
The Jakt -> Swift -> Rust pivots look like the same thing on a different level. The initial change to Swift was surely motivated by potential industry support gain (i believe it was a dubious choice from purely engineering standpoint).
It's awe-inspiring to see how a person can carve a job for himself, leverage hobbyists'/hackers' interest and contributions, attract industry attention and sponsors all while doing the thing he likes (assuming, browsers are his thing) in a controlling position.
Can't fully rationalize the feeling, but all of this makes me slightly wary. Doesn't make it less cool to observe from a side, though.
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Eh, he's given an interview where he talks about the Swift decision. He and several maintainers tried building some features in Swift, Rust, and C++, spending about two weeks on each one IIRC. And all the maintainers liked the experience of Swift better. That might have ended up wrong, but it's a pretty reasonable way to make a decision.
This looks like guerrilla advertising for sure.
LLM and rust rewrite together. And it does work so hopefully they get more attention and build it so I have an alternative browser to use
> but all of this makes me slightly wary.
Wary of what?
This is less about languages and more about so-called AI. One thing’s for sure: it’s becoming harder and harder to deny that agentic coding is revolutionizing software development.
We’re at the point where a solid test suite and a high-quality agent can achieve impressive results in the hands of a competent coder. Yes, it will still screw up, needs careful human review and steering, etc, but there is a tangible productivity improvement. I don’t think it makes sense putting numbers on it, but for many tasks, it looks like there’s a tangible benefit.
Yeah, this is glorified yak-shaving if we're being real. I'm not getting my hopes up for a true new browser