Video announcement by Chris Wanstrath (GitHub co-founder) of the 501© non-profit and $1,000,000 donation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9edTqPMX_k
I will never understand why people name stuff just by opening an English dictionary and simply picking a word.
Also why start a browser with C++? Google and Mozilla don’t employ nincompoops to work on their browsers and still say 70% of their CVEs are due to memory management errors from C++. Instead of learning from that, they start yet another browser in C++.
In theory it great that this org wants to make an alternative, and probably being funded by a millionaire (billionaire?) can’t hurt, but C++ man? Come on…
From.the FAQ
Why build a new browser in C++ when safer and more modern languages are available? Ladybird started as a component of the SerenityOS hobby project, which only allows C++. The choice of language was not so much a technical decision, but more one of personal convenience. Andreas was most comfortable with C++ when creating SerenityOS, and now we have almost half a million lines of modern C++ to maintain.
However, now that Ladybird has forked and become its own independent project, all constraints previously imposed by SerenityOS are no longer in effect. We are actively evaluating a number of alternatives and will be adding a mature successor language to the project in the near future. This process is already quite far along, and prototypes exist in multiple languages.
I hadn’t seen that, thanks! That gives me a little hope.
I will never understand why people name stuff just by opening an English dictionary and simply picking a word
Naming stuff is hard.
Yeah, but not that hard.
- La bird
- BB.Bird (baby bird)
- Birdanzo
- Lanzango
- Chicbee
- Elburd (el bird)
- Birday
- Bowsun
- Baysen
- Lirsi
- Slay BC
You can even put effort into it and look for translations in other languages, combine them, use a colloquialism not found in the standard dictionary, or so many other things.
For anybody else with the same question…
The Ladybird browser started as a part of the SerenityOS Project. SerenityOS had adopted Ladybug imagery before the browser was conceived. “Ladybird” seemed like a perfectly reasonable name for a core component of the OS given its existing iconography.
It was ( and is ) as good name in context.
Ladybird has decided to split with its SerenityOS roots. I have pretty mixed feelings on that. Regardless, it would be silly to change the name at this point.
The same history applies to C++. SerenityOS is written in C++. Until the split, the OS and browser were maintained in a mono repo with extremely deep code integration and coordination. They share the same custom C++ standard library and coding conventions for example.
SerenityOS was started as a very personal project and the original author is ( or was ) a fan of C++. While I am personally not a fan, it seems like a perfectly reasonable language choice to write an OS in.
I’ve seen C++ code written by Microsoft and I’ve got to say, they aren’t the brightest candles on the cake either.
I’ve seen C++ code holding up a Fortune 500 company with people actually sitting on the board of C++ and being part of the decision making process on what goes into C++. Even had an advanced course on it given by some of the people. Let me tell you, it doesn’t trickle down.
You can add all the macros and idioms you like, there will always be somebody loading an entire table from SQL into memory and dereferencing the each row+column with a double for-loop to find the correct row, then hand parsing the resulting row into the “right” in-memory data structure. Once you hit a column with variable length storing binary data (don’t ask) and the length is in a column with that doesn’t make it into the Row object, there is fun to be had.
My favorite is when you have a macro that hides what kind of pointer it is (shared, unique), but is only used when creating the variable, and someone uses a reinterpret_cast to solve some problem. Took a while to track that down. Bro, I fucking love the language.
Best of all is when code only has to pass some regression testing and has no code review. Absolute genius.
I will never understand why people are so miserable they feel the need to post grumpy and meaningless bad takes all day every day, with unenforceable anti-AI meme text in every post.
Another bad take of yours. Nice. It’s a pleasure blocking you 🫡
Agree with naming laziness. Ladybird is the name of a Lady Bug. Sick to death of things being named after animals. It’s a computer program not a living entity, it has no gender either. Even a nonsense word would be preferable to this mess. Lets call it Zalyo. No one else has that made up word, easy to search.
I don’t mind the name, but if we’re throwing out wishlist names, I vote for “‘Zombo,’ the browser where you can do anything!”
We don’t have anyone actively working on Windows support, […] We would like to do Windows eventually, but it’s not a priority at the moment.
As much as I applaud this focus on just one broad OS architecture, as it will greatly speed development, leaving out Windows is likely to cut off 85-90% of all early adopters. I just hope that the benefit of a simplified target will outweigh ignoring the vast majority of the market.
And honestly, methinks they should focus on Haiku OS before Windows, as it is closer to a Unix heritage than Windows is. And Haiku OS desperately needs a native modern web browser with all the bells and whistles.
If you are tech-savvy and looking for alternatives, you won’t use Windows.
There are plenty of programs out there which can end up being required for your workflow - as in, that exact program; no exceptions - and yet, have no Linux or even non-Windows version.
Not everything is a platformm-agnostic subscription-based SAAS yet, nor should that ever be the case.
I mean, it is nice to have options. However, a first alpha release in 2026? That’s more than a year away. A lot of stuff will happen until then, not unlikely that this gets stomped before that.
Yeah… It’s going to take a whole lot more than $1m for this. I am skeptical.
Also not super enthused about another browser written in C++. I skimmed some of their code and it seems pretty high quality, but still… this is going to be chock full of security bugs.
Servo is definitely the more interesting project.
They’re already exploring other languages. C++ just happens be its origin by way of its heritage. It’s not their target anymore.
Ultimately, we’ll see what happens. I agree that $1mil isn’t a ton for a big project, but we don’t know, yet, if they’ll be able to secure other big donations or not over the course of its life. People have sold stupider ideas to potential donors, so who knows?
Also not super enthused about another browser written in C++. I skimmed some of their code and it seems pretty high quality, but still… this is going to be chock full of security bugs.
If you are going to do anything stability-based these days, Rust should be a big consideration.
I thought this was the meta logo for a second.
