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0 pointstrashburger2y ago0 comments

> it's hard to escape the vague feeling some of this stuff might need to be architected in from the get go.

When I'm developing something, work or otherwise, I find that I often write my worst code when I'm writing something bottom-up i.e. designed, because it usually turns out that the user of that particular code has completely different needs, and the point of integration becomes a point of refactor. I think the top-down approach applied at the project level is much nicer because it allows you to _start from somewhere_ and then iteratively improve things.

That is not to say you shouldn't take precautions. In Ladybird, stuff like image decoding and webpage rendering/JS execution are isolated to their own processes, with OpenBSD style pledge/unveil sandboxing. They aren't perfect of course, but it allows for the kind of development that Ladybird has without much worry about those aspects.

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pvg2y ago· 2 in thread

I'm not really suggesting Ladybird is doing something "wrong" or should do something else. Reading something like:

The fix is to make Document::window() return a nullable value, and then handle null in a bajillion places.

makes me think you're going to find something like this and do this kind of fix maybe once, twice, five times and then probably decide you need a more fundamental fix of some sort. Another way of thinking about it is 'What would, say, the Google Chrome team, wish they could do were they starting from scratch?' i.e. aiming for the state of the art, rather than trying to catch up to it later which may turn out to be overwhelming.

UncleEntity2y ago

Even if they did 'something else' and produced a bullet-proof implementation they are still dealing with a buggy spec in the first place.

If someone thought their dev chops were 100% infallible why would they bother to fuzz the spec?

pvg2y ago

I think you're misunderstanding my point, it's not about implementation or spec bugs but design. Forget Ladybird for a moment and think of Firefox. Its core design was something along the lines of 'x-platform toolkit for making enterprise groupware apps' where one of the apps was a web browser. Kind of neat for 1998, by 2008 it was clear that's no longer a good fit for making a browser. Despite heroic efforts and many advances, Firefox has never really been able to close the gap to more recent browsers. And (statistically) nobody makes new browsers based on Firefox, it's effectively a design dead end.

It can be hard to retrofit 'complicated but decent parser with a js runtime attached' to something like 'safe parser of arbitrarily adversarial inputs connected to an open RCE' (i.e. something akin to a modern browser) if the latter wasn't a fundamental design goal to start with.

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