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Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

ladybird.org

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Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#101

Post by danielvaughn »

latexr wrote: post #76
giancarlostoro wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is also how some of us use Claude despite what the haters say. You dont just go “build thing” you architect, review, refine, test and build.

> how some of us Operative word being “some”. The issue is that too many aren’t doing it that way. > You dont just go “build thing” Tell that to the overwhelming majority of posters discussing vibe coding, including on HN.

Sure, but they're going to be stuck writing software for yesterday's problems. As our tools become more powerful, we're going to unlock new problems and expectations that would be impossible or impractical to solve with yesterday's tooling.

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#102

Post by polyterative »

skerit wrote: post #15

> I used Claude Code and Codex for the translation. This was human-directed, not autonomous code generation. I decided what to port, in what order, and what the Rust code should look like. It was hundreds of small prompts, steering the agents where things needed to go. After the initial translation, I ran multiple passes of adversarial review, asking different models to analyze the code for mistakes and bad patterns.…

I am having immense success with the latest models developing a personal project that I open sourced and then got burned off by.I can't write anymore by hands but I do enjoy writing prompts with my voice.I have been shipping the best code the project has ever seen.The revolution is real.

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#103

Post by cogman10 »

pjmlp wrote: post #69

All the best to them, however this feels like yah shaving instead of focusing into delivering a browser than can become an alternative to Safari/Chrome duopoly.

Agreed. They said they ruled out rust in 2024, I believe the article they published was near the end of 2024 because I remember reading it fairly recently.

Seems like a lot of language switches in a short time frame. That'd make me super nervous working on such a project. There will be rough parts for every language and deciding seemingly on whims that 1 isn't good enough will burn a lot of time and resources.

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#105

Post by philipallstar »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #24
skerit wrote: post #15

> I used Claude Code and Codex for the translation. This was human-directed, not autonomous code generation. I decided what to port, in what order, and what the Rust code should look like. It was hundreds of small prompts, steering the agents where things needed to go. After the initial translation, I ran multiple passes of adversarial review, asking different models to analyze the code for mistakes and bad patterns.…

This is also how some of us use Claude despite what the haters say. You dont just go “build thing” you architect, review, refine, test and build.

> despite what the haters say

Thinking people who disagree with you hate you or hate the thing you like is a recipe for disaster. It's much better to not love or hate things like this, and instead just observe and come to useful, outcome-based conclusions.

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#106

Post by nananana9 »

OtomotO wrote: post #53
nananana9 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure 25,000 lines translated in 2 weeks is "fast", for a naive translation between languages as similar as C++ and Rust (and Ladybird does modern RAII smart-pointer-y C++ which is VERY similar to Rust). You should easily be able to do 2000+ lines/day chunks.

2000+ lines/day chunks are 10 days for 20+k lines...

I'm aware. What I meant is this is a reasonable output for a 1:1 translation by hand, without LLM use.

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#107

Post by nicoburns »

matthewkosarek wrote: post #99
viktorcode wrote: post #2

> We previously explored Swift, but the C++ interop never quite got there But Rust doesn't have C++ interop at all?

There is also cxx.rs, which is quite nice, albeit you have to struggle sending `std` types back and forth a bit

> albeit you have to struggle sending `std` types back and forth a bit

Firefox solves this partly by not using `std` types.

For example, https://github.com/mozilla/thin-vec exists in large part because it's compatible with Firefox's existing C++ Vec/Array implementation (with the bonus that it's only 8 bytes on the stack compared to 24 for the std Vec).

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#108

Post by mr_mitm »

gnfargbl wrote: post #36
giancarlostoro wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is also how some of us use Claude despite what the haters say. You dont just go “build thing” you architect, review, refine, test and build.

It's how most of us are actually going to end up using AI agents for the foreseeable future, perhaps with increasing degrees of abstraction as we move to a teams-of-agents model. The industry hasn't come up with a simple meme-format term to explain this workflow pattern yet, so people aren't excited about it. But don't worry, we'll surely have a bullshit term for it soon, and managers everywhere will be excited. In t…

I thought the term was "agentic engineering"

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#109

Post by MrFurious »

gethly wrote: post #26

i rememebr seeing interviews saying rust is not suited for this project because of recursion and dom tree. how they tested multiple languages and settled on swift. then they abandon swift and now they shift towards rust. this entire project starts to look like "how am i feeling today?" rather than a serious project.

Yes, i understand that in a personal project, but they have investors behind them.

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#110

Post by usrbinenv »

This will be another bad decision just like with Swift. From what I heard, Rust is notoriously bad at letting people define their own structure and instead beats you up until you satisfy the borrow checker. I think it'll make development slow and unpleasant. There are people out there who enjoy that, but it's not a fit for when you need to deliver a really huge codebase in reasonable time. I remember Andreas mentioning he just wanted something like C++, but with a GC and D would be absolutely perfect for this job.
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