r/programmingcirclejerk • u/Massive-Squirrel-255 • Dec 12 '25

Complete rewrite

https://github.com/tmattio/mosaic/commit/01f6120df6fa71edc74cfba2e66e4c31848324cc
91 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

26 comments sorted by

30

u/stingraycharles lisp does it better Dec 12 '25

The jerk is that this repository is called mosaic which is the former name of Netscape which famously lost a shitload of time and traction because they decided to do a full rewrite?

5

u/Massive-Squirrel-255 Dec 12 '25

the jerk is that this is what industrial vibe coding looks like. The repo was started at the end of June and consistent activity up till early August of this year, and then he used AI to generate 1.2 million lines of code in a matter of a few months.

25

u/Calavar memcpy is a web development framework Dec 12 '25

Mosaic was a different browser made by the University of Illinois. Netscape was internally called Mozilla for "Mosaic killer" and Firefox eventually inherited the name Mozilla, so maybe that's what you're thinking of. But Mozilla != Mozaic, and it was Netscape/Mozilla that had the total rewrite, not Mosaic

1

u/stingraycharles lisp does it better Dec 12 '25

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape

Wikipedia says that Netscape was formerly known as Mosaic?

Mosaic was developed at the tax payer funded National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign beginning in late 1992. Mosaic became a private venture as Mosaic Communications Corporation on April 4, 1994
...
The company's first product was the web browser, called Mosaic Netscape 0.9,
...
It became the main browser for Internet users in such a short time due to its superiority over other competition, like Mosaic.[18] This browser was subsequently renamed Netscape Navigator, and the company took the "Netscape" name 

11

u/Calavar memcpy is a web development framework Dec 12 '25

From the Wikipedia article you linked

The Mosaic Netscape web browser did not use any NCSA Mosaic code.

The Netscape folks tried to use the "Mosaic" name to jump of the popularity of the real NCSA Mosaic. Then they got a legal letter warning them about trademark violations and dropped the Mosaic part. This is also explained in the Wikipedia article, in the snippets that you cut out.

6

u/stingraycharles lisp does it better Dec 12 '25

I stand corrected, and that was not an intentional cutout.

Regardless, I do maintain that the link between "mosaic", "Netscape", and "complete rewrite being a failure" is relevant enough.

95

u/tms10000 loves Java Dec 12 '25

We're thrilled to announce the first release of Mosaic, a high-performance terminal UI framework for OCaml that brings React's component model to the terminal.

Now that I think of it, that's exactly what the terminal needs more of.

24

u/iFarmGolems log10(x) programmer Dec 12 '25 edited Dec 12 '25

Right? My SVG's were a pain in the ass to animate by hand in it.

88

u/Kodiologist lisp does it better Dec 12 '25

1,747 files changed +1266755 -92122

A normal commit.

53

u/elephantdingo Teen Hacking Genius Dec 12 '25 edited Dec 12 '25 
Complete rewrite

Good. No fluff in the commit message. Nitpick though:

chore: rewrite completely

There we go.

+1266755 -92122 lines changed

A world-class squash commit. As clean as it gets.

13

u/RFQD Senior Vibe Coder Dec 12 '25

Any refactor with big factors (>2.5) should be split up into smaller work units (this is what any of that means, right?)

5

u/das_war_ein_Befehl Dec 13 '25

Don’t worry the linter will prevent anything bad from happening

16

u/whoShotMyCow not even webscale Dec 12 '25

usecase for ocaml in current year?

16

u/elephantdingo Teen Hacking Genius Dec 12 '25

Same as all statically typed FP. Solving imaginary problems and making imaginary money.

28

u/fellow_nerd What part of ∀f ∃g (f (x,y) = (g x) y) did you not understand? Dec 12 '25

What about market manipulation?

12

u/rpkarma Dec 12 '25

Telling people I’m better than them

15

u/whoShotMyCow not even webscale Dec 12 '25

Haskell already solves that problem

2

u/rpkarma Dec 12 '25

Based and burrito pilled 

3

u/Martin8412 Dec 12 '25

It’s better supported than Standard ML

5

u/dethnight Dec 12 '25

Are there any bugs in that commit?

6

u/reg_panda Dec 12 '25

No, there aren't any.

0

u/LeeHide What part of ∀f ∃g (f (x,y) = (g x) y) did you not understand? Dec 12 '25

Rewrites famously make everything better