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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

#281

Post by blibble »

ozgrakkurt wrote: post #84
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…

Spending weeks porting (presumably) working code with LLM is a bit strange

that's only the mechanical translation too

the hard bit (borrow checker) has still to be done...

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#282

Post by sdkfjhdsjk »

echelon wrote: post #199
lproven wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Rust is the final language. I honestly can't tell if this is a humorous attack or not. Poe's law is validated once again.

It's honest. If we can serialize our ideas to any language for durability, Rust is the way to go. It's not the best tool for the job for a lot of things, but if the LLMs make writing it as fast as anything else - whelp, I can't see any reason not to do it in Rust. If you get any language outputs "for free", Rust is the way to go. I've been using Claude to go ridiculously fast in Rust recently. In the pre-LLM years I…

[dead]

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#283

Post by hackpelican »

Cyphase wrote: post #188
ursuscamp wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They abandoned Swift recently.

The public announcement was less then a week ago. Meanwhile in TFA: > ... the entire port took about two weeks. So he was ~halfway in when he made the Swift announcement.

Doesn’t sound like a bad thing to evaluate the most obvious alternative to build confidence before officially pulling the plug.

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#284

Post by safercplusplus »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #35
samiv wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> then these two teams are essentially in a race against each other and the port will likely never catch up Ladybird appears to have the discipline to have recognized this: “[Rust] is not becoming the main focus of the project. We will continue developing the engine in C++, and porting subsystems to Rust will be a sidetrack that runs for a long time.”

And I might suggest that there's the possibility that the C++ code could end up being more cleanly ported to a memory-safe subset of C++. plug: https://github.com/duneroadrunner/scpptool/blob/master/appro...

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#285

Post by Rochus »

quesera wrote: post #273
Rochus wrote: post #191

Earlier 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…

> This completely misses the purpose of the downvoting feature "Downvote for disagree" has been canonicalized on HN since (nearly) the beginning, by pg himself, back when he used his real-name account to comment. :) I agree that it has undesirable consequences, but it is fully established.

Personally I would remove the downvote button entierly because apparently it is a lossy projection of an at least three-dimensional vector: agreement, quality, truth. Graying out text so it is no longer readable is a censoring measure not justified in most cases I encounter on HN in the eight years I'm here.

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#286

Post by klsdjfdlkfjsd »

echelon wrote: post #199
lproven wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Rust is the final language. I honestly can't tell if this is a humorous attack or not. Poe's law is validated once again.

It's honest. If we can serialize our ideas to any language for durability, Rust is the way to go. It's not the best tool for the job for a lot of things, but if the LLMs make writing it as fast as anything else - whelp, I can't see any reason not to do it in Rust. If you get any language outputs "for free", Rust is the way to go. I've been using Claude to go ridiculously fast in Rust recently. In the pre-LLM years I…

I'll just stick with C as my lingua franca, and won't be involving Microsoft in my programming life, thanks.

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#287

Post by adastra22 »

hocuspocus wrote: post #232
adastra22 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A language is more than a compiler. All of the Swift frameworks you would need to do anything actually useful or interesting in the language are macOS-only. You cannot develop in Swift for Windows/Linux/Android the way that you develop in Swift for macOS/iOS. That matters.

You don't need to convince me that Swift is poorly positioned there, but if you only care about server side (or possibly CLI) apps, the usable ecosystem on Linux isn't too shabby. Does it make sense compared to C#, Go, Rust or a JVM language? I don't know, but it's there, and Apple put some resources behind the initiative.

I think it is comparable to C#, at least C# a decade or more ago. Back then it was a great language for developing GUI applications on Windows, Unity games, and that's about it. Now there's a blossoming community of cross-platform frameworks, but only because Microsoft invested in making those first-class. Apple hasn't been putting that effort into Swift.

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#288

Post by _flux »

anon-3988 wrote: post #145
pjmlp wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I am on the provocative side that as AI tooling matures current programming languages will slowly become irrelevant. I am already using low code tooling with agents for some projects, in iPaaS products.

> Well, I am on the provocative side that as AI tooling matures current programming languages will slowly become irrelevant. I have the opposite opinion. As LLM become ubiquitous and code generation becomes cheap, the choice of language becomes more important. The problem with LLM for me is that it is now possible to write anything using only assembly. While technically possible, who can possibly read and understand…

> The problem with LLM for me is that it is now possible to write anything using only assembly. While technically possible, who can possibly read and understand the mountain of code that it is going to generate?

As a very practical problem the assembly would consume the context window like no other. And another is having some static guardrails; sometimes LLMs make mistakes, and without guard rails it debugging some of them becomes quite a big workload.

So to keep things efficient, an LLM would first need to create its own programming language. I think we'll actually see some proposals for a token-effective language that has good abstraction abilities for this exact use.

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#289

Post by alabhyajindal »

From their post on Twitter in 2024 when they adopted Swift, with a comment on Rust.

My general thoughts on Rust:

- Excellent for short-lived programs that transform input A to output B

- Clunky for long-lived programs that maintain large complex object graphs

- Really impressive ecosystem

- Toxic community

https://xcancel.com/awesomekling/status/1822241531501162806

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#290

Post by vipulbhj »

simonw wrote: post #132
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.

Given the quality of their existing test suite I'm confident the Ralph Wiggum loop would produce a working implementation... but the code quality wouldn't be anywhere near what they got from two weeks of hands-on expert prompting.

Sure yeah, I can buy that, but that would be like collecting tech debt for generations.
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