Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

Post by mr_mitm » Mon, Feb 23, 2026, 1:27 PM UTC

josephg wrote: post #95

patates wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Coding assistants are also really great at porting from one language to the other I had a broken, one-off Perl script, a relic from the days when everyone thought Drupal was the future (long time ago). It was originally designed to migrate a site from an unmaintained internal CMS to Drupal. The CMS was ancient and it only ran in a VM for "look what we built a million years ago" purposes (I even had written permissi…

> 10/10 - would generate tens of thousands of lines of useless code again. Me too! A couple days ago I gave claude the JMAP spec and asked it to write a JMAP based webmail client in rust from scratch. And it did! It burned a mountain of tokens, and its got more than a few bugs. But now I've got my very own email client, powered by the stalwart email server. The rust code compiles into a 2mb wasm bundle that does ever…

Post by throwaway2037 » Mon, Feb 23, 2026, 1:28 PM UTC

thrdbndndn wrote: post #124

ramon156 wrote: post #38

I'm a long-time Rust fan and have no idea how to respond. I think I need a lot more info about this migration, especially since Ladybird devs have been very vocal about being "anti-rust" (I guess more anti-hype, where Rust was the hype). I don't know if it's a good fit. Not because they're writing a browser engine in Rust (good), but because Ladybird praises CPP/Swift currently and have no idea what the contributor's…

I'd argue Ladybird itself is a "hype" project.

Post by throwaway2037 » Mon, Feb 23, 2026, 1:30 PM UTC

vipulbhj wrote: post #122

Someone should try this with the “Ralph Wiggum loop” approach. I suspect it would fail spectacularly, but it would be fascinating to watch. Personally, I can’t get meaningful results unless I use the tool in a true pair-programming mode—watching it reason, plan, and execute step by step. The ability to clearly articulate exactly what you want, and how you want it done, is becoming a rare skill.

    > Ralph Wiggum loop

Post by simonw » Mon, Feb 23, 2026, 1:31 PM UTC

samiv wrote: post #18

qudat wrote: post #7

> We know the result isn’t idiomatic Rust, and there’s a lot that can be simplified once we’re comfortable retiring the C++ pipeline. That cleanup will come in time. Correct me if I’m wrong since I don’t know these two languages, but like some other languages, doing things the idiomatic way could be dramatically different. Is “cleanup” doing a lot of heavy lifting here? Could that also mean another complete rewrite f…

This is the famous trap that Joel on Software talked about in a blog post long time ago. If you do a rewrite you essentially put everything else on halt while rewriting. If you keep doing feature dev on the old while another "tiger team" is doing the rewrite port then these two teams are essentially in a race against each other and the port will likely never catch up. (Depending on relative velocities) Maybe they thi…

Post by potato-peeler » Mon, Feb 23, 2026, 1:32 PM UTC

account42 wrote: post #93

potato-peeler wrote: post #83

Is there any discussion on why D or even Ada was not considered? These languages have been around for long time. If they were willing to use llm to break the initial barrier to entry for a new language, then a case can be made for these languages as well.

They already made the mistake picking a niche language twice (first their own language, then Swift as a cross-platform language), why would you want them to make it a third time?