What are Rust programmers to do now that LLMs can port code to Rust??
Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI
321–330 of 731 posts
Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI
#322Any word on how much more memory safe the implementation is? If passing a previous test suite is the criteria for success, what has changed, really? Are there previous memory safety tests that went from failing to passing? I am very interested to know if this time and energy spent actually improved memory safety. Other engineers facing the same challenges want to know!
If the previous impl had known memory safety issues I'd imagine they'd fix them as a matter of priority. It's hard to test for memory safety issues you don't know about. On the rust side, the question is how much `unsafe` they used (I would hope none at all, although they don't specify).
It is entirely possible a Rust port could have caught previously unknown memory safety issues. Furthermore, a Rust port that looks and feels like C++ may be peppered with unsafe calls to the point where the ROI on the port is greatly reduced.
I am not trying to dunk on the effort; quite the contrary. I am eager to hear more about the goals it originally set out to achieve.
Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI
#323Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same here. I had Claude write me a web based RSS feed reader in Rust. It has some minor glitches I still need to iron out, but it works great, is fast as can be, and is easy on the eyes. https://github.com/AdrianVollmer/FluxFeed
Rust is the final language. Defect free. Immaculate types. Safe. Ergonomic. Beautiful to read. AI is going to be writing a lot of Rust. The final arguments of "rust is hard to write" are going to quiet down. This makes it even more accessible.
Sometimes I forget programming languages aren't a religion, and then I see someone post stuff like this. Programming languages really do inspire some of us to feel differently.
Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI
#324> 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 had a script in another language. It was node, took up >200MB of RAM that I wanted back. "claude, rewrite this in rust". 192MB of memory returned to me.
This is sad to see. Node was originally one of the memory efficient options – it’s roots are solving the c10k problem. Mind sharing what libraries/frameworks you were using?
Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI
#325Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
are you implying that using Rust involves using MS products?
Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI
#326Any word on how much more memory safe the implementation is? If passing a previous test suite is the criteria for success, what has changed, really? Are there previous memory safety tests that went from failing to passing? I am very interested to know if this time and energy spent actually improved memory safety. Other engineers facing the same challenges want to know!
If the previous impl had known memory safety issues I'd imagine they'd fix them as a matter of priority. It's hard to test for memory safety issues you don't know about. On the rust side, the question is how much `unsafe` they used (I would hope none at all, although they don't specify).
You can look: https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird/pull/8104/files?...
It seems like it is used mostly for FFI.
Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI
#327Looks like Andreas is a mighty fine engineer, but he's even better entrepreneur. Doesn't matter if intentional or not, but he managed to create and lead a rather visible passion project, attract many contributors and use that project's momentum to detach Ladybird into a separate endeavor with much more concrete financial prospects. The Jakt -> Swift -> Rust pivots look like the same thing on a different level. The in…
This is less about languages and more about so-called AI. One thing’s for sure: it’s becoming harder and harder to deny that agentic coding is revolutionizing software development.
We’re at the point where a solid test suite and a high-quality agent can achieve impressive results in the hands of a competent coder. Yes, it will still screw up, needs careful human review and steering, etc, but there is a tangible productivity improvement. I don’t think it makes sense putting numbers on it, but for many tasks, it looks like there’s a tangible benefit.
Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI
#328> 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 had a bash spaghetti code script that I wrote a few years ago to handle TLS certificates(generate CSRs, bundle up trust chains, match keys to certs, etc). It was fragile, slow, extremely dependent on specific versions of OpenSSL, etc.
I used Claude to rewrite it in golang and extend its features. Now I have tests, automatic AIA chain walking, support for all the DER and JKS formats, and it’s fast. My bash script could spend a few minutes churning through a folder with certs and keys, my golang version does a few thousand in a second.
So I basically built a limited version of OpenSSL with better ergonomics and a lot of magic under the hood because you don’t have to specify input formats at all. I wasn’t constrained by things like backwards compatibility and interface stability, which let me make something much nicer to use.
I even was able to build a wasm version so it can run in the browser. All this from someone that is not a great coder. Don’t worry, I’m explicitly not rolling my own crypto.
Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI
#329Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agree, and it's also such a shame that none of the AI companies actually focus on that way of using AI. All of them are moving into the direction of "less human involved and agents do more", while what I really want is better tooling for me to work closer with AI and be better at reviewing/steering it, and be more involved. I don't want "Fire one prompt and get somewhat working code", I want a UX tailored for long se…
I think it was Steve Jobs who said computers should be like a bicycle for the mind, I tend to agree
Agents are a "self-driving car for the mind". I don't enjoy or dislike driving, but lots of Americans love to drive. In the future they will lament their driving skills' decline.
Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI
#330I'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…
it's very odd that someone with no experience would take a big project like this and just jump to another language because he trusts the AI generated code of current models
if it works it works i guess, but it seems mad to me on the surface