Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

ladybird.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 731 posts

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#341

Post by zamalek »

SatvikBeri wrote: post #279
ZoomZoomZoom wrote: post #192

Looks 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…

Eh, he's given an interview where he talks about the Swift decision. He and several maintainers tried building some features in Swift, Rust, and C++, spending about two weeks on each one IIRC. And all the maintainers liked the experience of Swift better. That might have ended up wrong, but it's a pretty reasonable way to make a decision.

Two weeks with Rust and you're still fighting with the compiler. I think the LLM pulled a lot of weight selling the language, it can help smooth over the tricky bits.

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#343

Post by bigstrat2003 »

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.

It's even worse than that. People are all too often willing to "flag for disagree". It's getting to be pretty common to see threads with comments that are [flagged][dead] which don't break the rules in any way, but merely express a view which is unpopular. Sometimes I even agree that it's a stupid position to take up, but that doesn't merit being flagged to death. I always vouch for those comments but it feels like an exercise in futility with so many people using the flag function as a "super fuck you" button.

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#344

Post by WesolyKubeczek »

I wouldn't mind if one result of this was a writeup on what patterns/antipatterns are there when converting code and concepts that used to be very aligned with C++-style OOP, deep inheritance and all that jazz, to what feels natural in Rust, and how you can rephrase those concepts without loss in the substance of what you need to do.

I guess it's a long way off, since the LLM translation would need to be refactored into natural Rust first. But the value of it would be in that it's a real world project, and not a hypothetical "well, you could probably just...".

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#345

Post by bigstrat2003 »

aero-glide2 wrote: post #11

Sigh agents keep killing all the passion I have for programming. It can do things way faster than me, and better than me in some cases. Soon it will do everything better and faster than me.

Despite the many claims to the contrary, agents can't do anything better than a human yet. Faster, certainly, but the quality is always poor compared to what a human would produce. You aren't obsolete yet, brother.

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#346

Post by zppln »

Cool project, but I'm a bit curious hearing how the rest of the project feels about this?

I'm not sure how I'd feel if I woke up and found a system I worked on had been translated into an another language I'm not neccessarily familiar with. And I'm not sure I'd want to fix an non-idiomatic "mess" just because it's been translated into a language I'm familiar with either (although I suspect they'll have no problem attracting rust developers).

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#347

Post by giancarlostoro »

newswasboring wrote: post #194
giancarlostoro wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like "spec driven development" but I honestly don't care what you call it, just let me build things and leave me alone. :)

SDD is more like a subset. There are different ways to manage context in agentic engineering

I guess, I just know I force my agent to use a ticketing system like Beads (I made my own).

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#348

Post by ivell »

pjmlp wrote: post #71
djoldman wrote: post #66

A lot of the previous calculus around refactoring and "rewrite the whole thing in a new language" is out the window now that AI is ubiquitous. Especially in situations where there is an extensive test suite. Testing has become 10x as important as ever.

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.

I would say that current programming languages have a better chance due to the huge amount of code that AI can train on. New languages do not have that leverage. Moreover, current languages have large ecosystems that still matter.

I see the opposite. New languages have more difficulty breaking into popularity due to lack of enough existing codename and ecosystems.

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#349

Post by Barbing »

Sharlin wrote: post #334
uyzstvqs wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It burned through a mountain of tokens, but 10/10 - would generate tens of thousands of lines of useless code again. 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…

Wasting electricity to "generate tens of thousands of lines of useless code" at will? Why is that in any way a desirable future?

Optimists will imagine it to one day be as taxing and thus as wasteful as firing up MS Paint.

No that’s a stretch, but firing up a AAA game.

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#350

Post by Barbing »

dsr_ wrote: post #44
embedding-shape wrote: post #29

Earlier 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…

Is it any surprise that the cocaine cartels really want you to buy more cocaine, so they don't focus on its usefulness in pain relief and they refine it and cut it with the cheapest substances that will work rather than medical-grade reagents? Same thing.

LLMs are drugs because they’re addictive and sap your abilities, is it?

(or generally: “Is the cocaine cartel comparison fair or unfair?”)

Post reply on HN