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Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

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Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#471

Post by refsys »

JetSetIlly wrote: post #468
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…

"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 want less ambitious LLM powered tools than what's being offered. For example, I'd love a tool that can analyse whether comments have been kept up to date with the code they refer to. I don't wan…

Any terminal tool like Claude Code or Codex (I assume OpenCode too, but I haven't tried) can do it, by using as a prompt pretty much exactly what you wrote, and if it still wants to edit, just don't approve the tool calls.

One problem I've noticed is that both claude models and gpt-codex variants make absolutely deranged tool calls (like `cat > foo...EOF` pattern to create a file, or sed to read a couple lines), so it's sometimes hard to see what is it even trying to do.

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#472

Post by array_key_first »

nicoburns wrote: post #55
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…

A mitigating factor in this case is the C++ and Rust are both multi-paradigm languages. You can quite reasonably represent most C++ patterns in Rust, even if it might not be quite how you'd write Rust in the first place.

In addition, C++ and Rust are very, very similar languages. Almost everything in C++ translates easily, including low level stuff and template shenanigans. There's only a few "oh shit there's no analog" things, like template specialization or virtual inheritance.

Out of all the languages rust takes inspiration from, id rank C++ at the top of the list.

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#474

Post by accelbred »

Levitating wrote: post #450
accelbred wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its possible to dislike Rust but pragmatically use it. Personally, I do not like Rust, but it is the best available choice for some work and personal stuff.

So what don't you like about it?

Its for the time being is stuck with LLVM, so I can't currently LTO with GCC objects. Its got a lot higher complexity than I perfer in a language. A lot of features I find important seem perma-unstable. Pin is unnessesarily confusing. No easy way to define multiple compilation units for use with linker object selection and attribute constructor. The easy path is downloading binary toolchains with rustup and not using your disto package manager. You can't use unstable features without the bootstrap env var on distro rust toolchains. Cargo leads to dependency bloat. The std/core crates are prebuilt binaries and bloat binary sizes. Bindgen doesn't translate static inline code. The language has a ton of stuff it exposes just to std and not user code. Unsafe code is unergonomic. No easy way to model a cleanup function that needs more args. No support for returns_twice. No ability to use newer stuff like preserve_none. Can't go-to-definition from a bindgen binding to original header file. Macros pollute global namespace. Can't account for platforms where size_t and uintptr_t are different. Traits can only be relied on if marked unsafe. Can't implement something like defer since it holds a borrow. no_std code still can pull in core::fmt. Can't enforce dependencies are also no_std. Panics are considered safe. No way to add non-function fields to dyn vtables. No way to declare code separately from definition. No way to have duplicate type definitions that merge, making interop between different bindgen generated modules annoying.

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#475

Post by [deleted] »

shevy-java wrote: post #462
accelbred wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its possible to dislike Rust but pragmatically use it. Personally, I do not like Rust, but it is the best available choice for some work and personal stuff.

I think this is a good, realistic point of view. Personally I think most programming languages have really ... huge problems. And the languages that are more fun to use, ruby or python, are slow. I wonder if we could have a great, effective, elegant language that is also slow. All that try end up with e. g. with a C++ like language.

[deleted]

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#476

Post by jacquesm »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #465
echelon wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Rust is the final language. > Defect free. I am an upstream developer on the Rust Project (lang, library, cargo, others), and obviously a big fan of Rust. This kind of advocacy doesn't help us, and in fact makes our jobs harder , because for some people this kind of advocacy is their main experience of people they assume are representative of Rust. Please take it down a notch. I think Rust is the best available lan…

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#477

Post by muyuu »

jibal wrote: post #439
muyuu wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did, and the point stands because reading someone else's code is not the same as writing it, esp. when you're not able to do so to the same standard

Non sequitur. Again, no trust was involved, only verification through extreme testing. Also, as others have pointed out, "someone with no experience" simply isn't true.

the trust element to me is jumping into a port, not specific code although code you didn't write in a language you're not an expert with, will ALWAYS introduce an added risk of falling into pitfalls you can only avoid with experience, the more the merrier

you're banking in the LLMs quite strongly when you do that, which may just work but i would be very worried about myself if i were in his boots

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#478

Post by ozgrakkurt »

cyode wrote: post #388
jp1016 wrote: post #300

The byte-for-byte identical output requirement is the smartest part of this whole thing. You basically get to run the old and new pipelines side by side and diff them, which means any bug in the translation is immediately caught. Way too many rewrites fail because people try to "improve" things during the port and end up chasing phantom bugs that might be in the old code, the new code, or just behavioral differences.…

I hope, with the velocity unlocked by these tools, that more pure ports will become the norm. Before, migrations could be so costly that “improving” things “while I’m here” helped sell doing the migration at all, especially in business settings. Only to lead to more toil chasing those phantom bugs.

One of the biggest point of rewriting is you know better by then so you create something better.

This is a HUUUGE reason code written in rust tended to be so much better than the original (which was probably written in c++).

Human expertise is the single most important factor and is more important than language.

Copy pasting from one language to another is way worse than complete rewrite with actual idiomatic and useful code.

Best option after proper rewrite is binding. And copy-paste with LLM comes way below these options imo.

If you look at real world, basically all value is created by boring and hated languages. Because people spent so much effort on making those languages useful, and other people spent so much effort learning and using those languages.

Don’t think anyone would prefer to work in a rust codebase that an LLM copy-pasted from c++, compared to working on a c++ codebase written by actual people that they can interact with.

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#479

Post by LoganDark »

srcreigh wrote: post #437
mr_mitm wrote: post #131

Earlier 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

Re "is fast as can be": in my experience generating C/Zig code via Codex, agent generated code is usually several multiples slower than hand optimized code.

Given parent and GP are both using Claude... have you tried Claude? (I say this as someone who has not tried Claude recently. I did try Claude Code when it first came out, though.)

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#480

Post by vunderba »

refsys wrote: post #471
JetSetIlly wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 want less ambitious LLM powered tools than what's being offered. For example, I'd love a tool that can analyse whether comments have been kept up to date with the code they refer to. I don't wan…

Any terminal tool like Claude Code or Codex (I assume OpenCode too, but I haven't tried) can do it, by using as a prompt pretty much exactly what you wrote, and if it still wants to edit, just don't approve the tool calls. One problem I've noticed is that both claude models and gpt-codex variants make absolutely deranged tool calls (like `cat > foo...EOF` pattern to create a file, or sed to read a couple lines), so i…

I’m glad I’m not the only one who’s noticed these seemingly arbitrary calls to write files using the cat command instead of the native file edit capabilities of the agent.
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