I agree, but (hot take) I think that Discord is even worse than Facebook.

Even if that were true, and it seems unlikely, that’s still an order of magnitude more than the ladybug devs.

It might seem that way but it’s a fairly arrogant assertion. They’re a sophisticated organisation with a lot of well experienced people guiding them. As an outsider it’s easy to criticise their seemingly endless series of bad decisions, but I’m still confident that internally all of these decisions seemed like a good idea at the time.

Besides which, this would be a good reason to fork their codebase rather than starting from scratch.

Andreas Kling, the founder and lead dev, has a massive love for Twinings tea and spent a few Dev logs working on improving their website with the end goal being ordering his tea from them :)

You’d get nowhere using assembly because people wanted to keep improving technology.

The Nokia was actually build and freakin’ rock solid. Then came smartphones because people wanted to improve. It sure wasn’t easy and they didn’t go Geez, a phone from scratch? Why bother?

It was fine when it was contained to an actual web site instead of infecting desktop software too. To me, using JS for that purpose feels like using PHP to write a 3D video game.

Eh, scriptable content was probably fine.

Techbros going ‘holy shit, we should make EVERYTHING a website!’ was the curse that doomed us.

I think google need firefox exist to avoid anti trust, and Mozilla need google to keep the the six figures payroll for the CEO. So yes.

Thanks for laying out your concerns. As a C++ developer who does not know the other languages you speak of (I assume Rust, Go), I can agree to some of your points, but also some of them I see differently:

1. C++ can be complex, because it has a lot of features and especially the newer standards have brought some syntax that is hard to understand or read at times. However, those elements are not frequently used, or if they are, the developer will get used to them quickly & they won’t make development slow. As a matter of fact, most development time should be spent on thinking about algorithms, and thinking very well before implementing them - and until implementation, the language does not matter. I do not think that language complexity leads to increased bugs per se. My biggest project is just short of 40k lines of code, and most of the bugs I produced were the classical “off by one” or missing range checks, bugs that you can just as well produce in other languages.

2. C++ no longer requires you to do manual memory management - that is what smart pointers are for, and RAII-programming.

3. I can’t make a qualified comment on that, due to lack of expertise - you might be right.

4. You’re somewhat repeating point 1) here with slow development. But you raise a good point: web standards have become insane in terms of quantity and interface sizes. Everyone and their dog wants to reinvent the wheel. That in itself requires a very large team to support I would say. As stated for point 1), I do not agree development in C++ has to be slower

5. True, as someone who just suffered from problems introduced on windows (cygwin POSIX message queues implementation got broken by Win10, and inotify does not work on Windows Subsystem for Linux) I can confirm that while the C++ standard library is not much of a problem, the moment you interface with the host OS, you leave the standard realm and it becomes “zombieland”. Also, for some reason, the realtime library implementation on MacOS is different, breaking some very simple time-based functions. So yeah, that’s annoying to circumvent, but can be done by creating platform specific wrapper libraries that create a uniform API. For other languages, it appears this is done by the compilers, which is probably better - meaning the I/O operations got taken into those language’s core features

6. I am highly doubtful of people relying on garbage collection - a programmer that doesn’t know exactly when his objects come into existence, and when they cease to exist is likely to make much bigger mistakes and produce very inefficient code. The aforementioned smart pointers in C++ solve this issue: object lifetime is the scope of the smart pointer declaration, and for shared pointers, object lifetime expires when the last process using it leaves the scope in which it is declared. For concurrent programming, I do not know if you mean concurrency (threads) or multiple people working on the same project. While multi-threading can be a bit “weird” at first, you have a lot of control over shared variables and memory barriers in C++ that might enable a team to produce a browser that is much faster, which I believe is a core requirement towards modern browsers

As for your tl;dr: definitely not “less concurrency”, that makes no sense. The other points may or may not be true, keeping in mind the answers I gave above.

I agree that Rust is the way to go, but calling something “arguably” & “objectively” in the same breath is a bit of a paradox innit?

Rust is great, but anybody developing something should have the ability to choose whatever programming language they prefer. If you want it made with rust, make it yourself.