I’ve been part of at least 2 successful rewrites. I think that Joel’s post is too often taken as gospel. Sometimes a rewrite is the best way forward.

Moving Ladybird from C++ to a safer more modern language is a real differentiator vs other browsers, and will probably pay dividends. Doing it now is better than doing it once ladybird is fully established.

One last point about rewrites: you can look at any industry disruptor as essentially a team that did a from-scratch rewrite of their competitors and won because the rewrite was better.

Nearly 26 years ago! https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

What's different today really is the LLMs and coding agents. The reason to never rewrite in another language is that it requires you to stop everything else for months or even years. Stopping for two weeks is a lot less likely to kill your project.

> then these two teams are essentially in a race against each other and the port will likely never catch up

Ladybird appears to have the discipline to have recognized this: “[Rust] is not becoming the main focus of the project. We will continue developing the engine in C++, and porting subsystems to Rust will be a sidetrack that runs for a long time.”

The context matters when we talk about Joel's article[0].

It's about Netscape. By the time, Netscape had dominated the browser market. It was the leader and that means they had all the market share to lose. You can bet Microsoft's decision makers were very closely monitoring what those at Netscape were doing.

Today, practically nobody uses Ladybird. No one even knows it[1]. It's so behind and has nothing to lose. If you really want to rewrite, it's better to do it when you have nothing to lose.

[0]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

[1]: to quote Joel, "no one" means less than one million people.