I did actually watch a friend compile and run it, and we tried it on a couple of simple web pages and were impressed with the results!

However, there are two barriers to me building it myself and submitting PRs. The first is that it's not officially supported to build or run on Windows, so I'd have to get familiar with WSL first or set up a dual-boot environment.

The second is that it's written in the obsolete and unusable language of C++. I would have loved an opportunity here to get into Rust or something, but C++ has proven itself hazardous to my mental health, so I'm staying away from it.

I love Rust, but I do not like how people are rust evangelists and look down on everything else. That is not how we in the Rust community look at things.

Now, with that out of the way. Andreas has been very clear about the reasons why C++ is the chosen language. He has years of experience with it along with writing browsers.

Im paraphrasing here, but he has said that the web evolved around the era of OOP and C++ is the OOP language of that era. Including statements on how C++ fits nicely with the OOP styles of web specs.

There’s always the option of contributing to Servo if you’re interested in Rust and browser engineering.

For the WSL part: that's one command in powershell/cmd and then a download from the Microsoft store. You won't find it challenging, there's not much more to it than that in 99% of cases (and if you do run into issues, there are probably better alternatives to trying to fix WSL anyway).

As for C++, Ladybird uses very modern C++ that makes it substantially easier to write reasonably safe code than the C++ of yore.

Still, as much as I would like to see the world move to safer languages, C++ is everywhere. Every major browser is written in it. It's not "unusable" in the slightest (though I certainly understand not wanting to learn C++ as an outsider at this point in time, it's a quite boring language in comparison and the C++ job market probably won't let you make use of modern language features that might make it interesting).

I would love to live in a world where projects with security risks like web browsers would "just" use Rust instead of C++ but you'll have to convince the people building the browser to spend their own time or their bosses' time to learn Rust first, and that's a tough sell.

There's Servo if you want to contribute to an open source browser in Rust. It looks like it can certainly use the help it you compare its development speed with Ladybird.

Unusable yet people have written a browser in it?

I don't know which bubble you are in, but C++ is nowhere near obsolete status. As much as want Rust to be adopted widely, that still hasn't happened, despite small-scale effort to sprinkle it in various projects.

> The second is that it's written in the obsolete and unusable language of C++.

Oh come on. There's nicer ways to say "I'm not good at it". It's OK you know, you can't be good at everything. Just don't make it other people's fault.

Those are two you-problems.