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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

#161

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

vdupras wrote: post #31
VMG wrote: post #6

developers with good taste like Andreas Kling will be able to design entire OSes with coding agents

This comment raises an interesting question: Would Serenity OS have brought Andreas the same kind of serenity had it been developed with AI? Open candid question.

I don't think so because if I remember it correctly, Andreas suffered from alcoholism and serenity prayer helped him to go on the right path and iirc he honored that and created an os named serenityos.

God grant me the serenity

to accept the things I cannot change;

courage to change the things I can;

and wisdom to know the difference.

(courage to change the things I can;):- I think that this line must've given Andreas the strength, the passion to make the project reality.

but if AI made the change. Would the line be changed to courage to prompt an all powerful entity to change the things I asked it to.

Would that give courage? Would that inspire confidence in oneself?

I have personally made many projects with LLM's (honestly I must admit that I am a teenager and so I have been sort of using it from the start)

and personally, I feel like there are some points of curiosity that I can be prideful of in my projects but there is still a sense of emptiness and I think I am not the only one who observes it as such.

I think in the world of AI hype, it takes true courage & passion to write by hand.

Obviously one tries to argue that AI is the next bytecode but that is false because of the non deterministic nature of AI but even that being said, I think I personally feel as if the people who write assembly are definitely likely to be more passionate of their craft than Nodejs (and I would consider myself a nodejs guy and there's still passion but still)

Coding was definitely a form of art/expression/sense-of-meaning for Mr Andreas during a time of struggle. To automate that might strip him of the joy derived from stroking brush on an empty canvas.

Honestly, I really don't know about AI the more I think about it so I will not pretend that I know a thing/two about AI. This message is just my opinion in the moment. Opinions change with time but my opinion right now is that coding by hand definitely is more meaningful than not if the purpose of the project is to derive meaning.

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#162

Post by echelon »

mr_mitm wrote: post #131
josephg wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 10/10 - would generate tens of thousands of lines of useless code again. Me too! A couple days ago I gave claude the JMAP spec and asked it to write a JMAP based webmail client in rust from scratch. And it did! It burned a mountain of tokens, and its got more than a few bugs. But now I've got my very own email client, powered by the stalwart email server. The rust code compiles into a 2mb wasm bundle that does ever…

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.

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#163

Post by throwaway2037 »

alpinisme wrote: post #28
mosura wrote: post #4

Interestingly editorialized title omits “with help from AI”.

That’s probably just the classic HackerNews title shortening algorithm at work.

    > classic HackerNews title shortening algorithm
Woah, this is a wild claim. @dang: Is this a thing? I don't believe it. I, myself, have submitted many articles and never once did I see some auto-magical "title shortening algorithm" at work!

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#164

Post by [deleted] »

account42 wrote: post #91

> We previously explored Swift, but the C++ interop never quite got there, and platform support outside the Apple ecosystem was limited. Why was there ever any expectation for Swift having good platform support outside Apple? This should have been (and was to me) already obvious when they originally announced moving to Swift.

[deleted]

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#165

Post by pjmlp »

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…

Lets say years of offshoring projects have helped to reach that opinion.

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#166

Post by pjmlp »

cromka wrote: post #128
pjmlp wrote: post #69

All the best to them, however this feels like yah shaving instead of focusing into delivering a browser than can become an alternative to Safari/Chrome duopoly.

Part of browser experience is safety and migrating their JS library to Rust is probably one of the best ways to gain advantage over any other existing engine out there in this aspect. Strategically this may and likely will attract 3rd party users of the JS library itself, thus helping its adoption and further improving it. They're not porting the browser itself to Rust, for the record.

Yet, they are open to further rewrites.

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#167

Post by freeopinion »

embedding-shape wrote: post #29
skerit wrote: post #15

> 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.…

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…

Of course there are tools focusing on this. It takes a little getting used to how prevalent it is. My editor now can anticipate the next three lines of code I intend to write complete with what values I want to feed to the function I was about to invoke. It all shows up in an autocomplete annotation for me. I just type the first two or three characters and press tab to get everything exactly how I was about to type it in--including an accurate comment worded exactly in my voice.

Is that what you mean by IA?

For example, I type "for" and my editor guesses I want to iterate over the list that is the second argument of the function for which I am currently building the body. So it offers to complete the rest of the loop condition for me. Not only did it anticipate that I am writing a for loop. It figures out what I want to iterate over, and perhaps even that I want to enumerate the iteration so I have the index and the value. Imagine if I had written a comment to explain my intent for the function before I started writing the function body. How much better could it augment my intellect?

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#168

Post by staticassertion »

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 don't agree. For one thing, the language directly impacts things like iteration speed, runtime performance, and portability. For another, there's a trade-off between "verbose, eats context" and "implicit, hard to reason about".

IMO Rust will strike a very strong balance here for LLMs.

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#169

Post by nicoburns »

josephg wrote: post #115
abuyalip wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still don’t buy this “safer more modern” mentality. Modern C++ pretty much solves the safety issues. People need to learn how to use tools properly. If you ask me, Go is a better Rust. Rust is an ugly version of C++ with longer compile times and a band of zealous missionaries. I mean the keywords mut and fn very annoying to read just get rid of them or spell the f*n thing function.

> Go is a better Rust. Rust is an ugly version of C++ with longer compile times and a band of zealous missionaries. Eh. There's a lot I like about Go. I adore its compilation speed and the focus on language simplicity. But its got plenty of drawbacks too. Default nullability is a huge mistake. And result types (zig, swift, rust) are way better than go's error handling. Sum types in general are missing from Go, and on…

> Compiling stalwart takes about 20 minutes

20 minutes! What hardware is this on? I've worked on Rust projects with similar numbers of dependencies where the compile time (for a clean release build) was 2-4 minutes (on a MacBook M1 Pro)

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#170

Post by giancarlostoro »

gnfargbl wrote: post #36
giancarlostoro wrote: post #24

Earlier 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…

I havent quite dealt with "teams of agents" yet outside of Claude Code itself spawning subagents, but I have some ideas as to how to achieve it in a meaningful way without giving a developer 10 claude code licenses, I think the real approach that makes more sense to me is to still have humans in the loop, but have their respective agents sync together and divide work towards one goal, but being able to determine which tasks are left to be worked one and tested. I do think for the foreseeable future you will need human validation for AI.
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