We’ve been searching for a memory-safe programming language to replace C++ in Ladybird for a while now. We previously explored Swift, but the C++ interop never quite got there, and platform support outside the Apple ecosystem was limited. Rust is a different story. The ecosystem is far more mature for systems programming, and many of our contributors already know the language. Going forward, we are rewriting parts of Ladybird in Rust.
https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz - This kinda covers the “engine without JS” part, it’s a bit more limited, but also in alpha. It’s part of the dioxus project, they use it for rendering UI on desktop.
Oh now that’s interesting. I’ve always wondered (not knowing much about how they’re made) if it would be possible to make a desktop compositor for Linux that simply uses HTML and CSS. One could even natively embed local pages in it.
Gnome shell uses JS and CSS (i beleive anyway), and the w11 start menu is supposedly react native, so I think the answer is definitely yes.
I knew there was a reason why it sucked so much!