Earlier quoted context omitted.
But not the stance on Rust, which is something I'm wondering. I understand there's a core team assigned, but are the ~200 contributors okay with this migration?
Why would 200 contributors have to be okay with this migration? The project has a leader, the leader makes decisions.
Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI
241–250 of 731 posts
Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
> which might have the HN people who prefer rust to respond with downvotes. This completely misses the purpose of the downvoting feature, which is not surprising, since upvoting seems no longer to indicate quality or truth of the comment neither. > rust is this sort of equilibra that the world has reached for, especially security related projects Which is amazing, since Rust only covers a fraction of safety/security…
> If you compare it to the very recend C++ implementations they are using, I tend to agree. But if you compare it to a much more mature technology like e.g. Ada, I have my doubts. I agree with you in the sense that it would've definitely been interesting to read what Andreas thinks of Ada/D and the discussion surrounding it and your overall comment too. I do wish that anyone from ladybird team/maybe even Andreas if h…
In the time of good LLMs this is likely no longer a show-stopper (as e.g. the specific formating rules in C/C++ since there are good re-formating tools). The question is how long we will need programming languages at all. They were primarily invented because large assembler projects were too challenging for most people. But if all the complicated details can now be delegated to LLMs, strictly speaking, we no longer need programming languages either.
Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI
#243Earlier 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…
It's vibe engineering
Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI
#244> After the initial translation, I ran multiple passes of adversarial review, asking different models to analyze the code for mistakes and bad patterns. I feel like you just know it’s doomed. What this is saying is “I didn’t want to and cannot review the code it generated” asking models to find mistakes never works for me. It’ll find obvious patterns, a tendency towards security mistakes, but not deep logical errors.
Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI
#245> 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.…
> 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…
This is the biggest bottleneck at this point. I'm looking forward to RAM production increasing, and getting to a point where every high-end PC (workstation & gaming) has a dedicated NPU next to the GPU. You'll be able to do this kind of stuff as much as you want, using any local model you want. Run a ralph loop continuously for 72 hours? No problem.
Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI
#246Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd argue Ladybird itself is a "hype" project.
Fair point. What does Ladybird need to achieve in your opinion to shake the "hype" label? Honestly, I, myself, don't have a good answer!
As a browser, Ladybird usefulness is currently quite limited for obvious reasons. This is not meant to dismiss its achievements, nor to overlook the fact that building a truly useful browser for everyday users is something few open source teams can accomplish without the backing of a billion dollar company. Still, in its present state, its practical utility remains limited.
Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI
#248Fuck me. This is wild. Sorry for the potty mouth. > Porting LibJS > Our first target was LibJS , Ladybird’s JavaScript engine. The lexer, parser, AST, and bytecode generator are relatively self-contained and have extensive test coverage through test262, which made them a natural starting point. > Results > The requirement from the start was byte-for-byte identical output from both pipelines. The result was about 25,0…
Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am somewhat concerned about the volatility. All three languages have their merits and each has a stable foundation that has been developed and established over many years. The fact that the programming language has been “changed” within a short period of time, or rather that the direction has been altered, does not inspire confidence in the overall continuity of Ladybird's design decisions.
There's been some fun volatility with the author over the years. I told him once that he might want to consider another language to which he replied slightly insultingly. Then he tried to write another language. Then he tried to switch from C++ to Swift, and now to Rust :P
Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI
#250> After the initial translation, I ran multiple passes of adversarial review, asking different models to analyze the code for mistakes and bad patterns. I feel like you just know it’s doomed. What this is saying is “I didn’t want to and cannot review the code it generated” asking models to find mistakes never works for me. It’ll find obvious patterns, a tendency towards security mistakes, but not deep logical errors.
Your argument is just as applicable on human code reviewers. Obviously having others review the code will catch issues you would never have thought of. This includes agents as well.