> The Ladybird devs painted themselves in a corner when choosing C++ for a new web browser, with many anti-Rust folks claiming that "modern C++ was safe". Well...

Perhaps, but in fairness the project was started in 2018 when Rust was still new and unproven.

> You can't compare the choices made to evolve a >20 years old codebase with a brand new one.

I guess not, but I'm pretty optimistic about Ladybird's ability to adopt Rust if they want to. It's a much smaller codebase than Firefox (~650K LoC).

This initial PR is already ~25k LoC, so approximately 4% of the codebase. It took 1 person 2 weeks to complete. If you extrapolate from that, it would take 1 person-year to port the whole thing, which is not so bad considering that you could spread that work out over multiple years and multiple people.

And Firefox has shown that the intermediate state where you have a mix of languages is viable over the long term, even in a much larger and more complex codebase.

> Perhaps, but in fairness the project was started in 2018 when Rust was still new and unproven.

Rust was already proven in 2018, and I'm pretty sure they went with C++ for other reasons.