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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

#211

Post by GoblinSlayer »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #152
christophilus wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been part of at least 2 successful rewrites. I think that Joel’s post is too often taken as gospel. Sometimes a rewrite is the best way forward. Moving Ladybird from C++ to a safer more modern language is a real differentiator vs other browsers, and will probably pay dividends. Doing it now is better than doing it once ladybird is fully established. One last point about rewrites: you can look at any industry dis…

> I’ve been part of at least 2 successful rewrites. I think that Joel’s post is too often taken as gospel. Sometimes a rewrite is the best way forward. HN nerd-snipe alert! OK, you got me good. Can you share some battle stories? I have also been part of rewrites in my career, but my experience is mixed. I'm not here to simple brush away your experience; I want to know more about why you think (in retrospective) it wa…

Firefox, Opera and first Edge were rewrites.

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#212

Post by Aurornis »

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.…

Coding assistants are great at pattern matching and pattern following. This is why it’s a good idea to point them at any examples or demos that come with the libraries you want to use, too.

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#214

Post by the_duke »

jvillasante wrote: post #37

> We’ve been searching for a memory-safe programming language to replace C++ in Ladybird for a while now. The article fails to explain why. What problems (besides the obvious) have been found in which "memory-safe languages" can help. Do these problems actually explain the need of adding complexity to a project like this by adding another language? I guess AI will be involved which, at this early point in the project…

Even Chrome has started to adopt Rust due to recurring memory vulnerabilities.... that's a big enough reason.

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#215

Post by tasuki »

patates wrote: post #68
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.…

> Coding assistants are also really great at porting from one language to the other I had a broken, one-off Perl script, a relic from the days when everyone thought Drupal was the future (long time ago). It was originally designed to migrate a site from an unmaintained internal CMS to Drupal. The CMS was ancient and it only ran in a VM for "look what we built a million years ago" purposes (I even had written permissi…

> a relic from the days when everyone thought Drupal was the future (long time ago).

Drupal is the future. I never really used it properly, but if you fully buy into Drupal, it can do most everything without programming, and you can write plugins (extensions? whatever they're called...) to do the few things that do need programming.

> The Epilogue: That site has since been ported to WordPress, then ProcessWire, then rebuilt as a Node.js app. Word on the street is that some poor souls are currently trying to port it to Next.js.

This is the problem! Fickle halfwits mindlessly buying into whatever "next big thing" is currently fashionable. They shoulda just learned Drupal...

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#216

Post by giancarlostoro »

mghackerlady wrote: post #184
giancarlostoro wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at any HN thread that has a project that uses AI in any way, shape or form. People quickly remark that it is slop, without even reviewing the code. If that's not blind hatred of AI, I don't know what is. There's a huge distinction between Vibe Coding, and actual software engineers using AI tooling effectively. I vibe code for fun sometimes too, nothing wrong with it, helps me figure out how the model behaves in…

Vibe Coding is like porn for programmers. It probably isn't good for you, and you'd probably be better off actually doing the thing yourself, but it feels good and satisfies our desires for instant gratification

Well, take for example, I have ideas I've had for years but no time for because by now the requirements are insane. I want to build a backend that could survive nuclear fallout type stuff. I braindump to Claude, watch it churn out my vision for the last 12 years, its insane.

There's other things too though: my ADD and my impostor syndrome don't matter to Claude, Claude just takes it all in, so as I keep brain dumping, it keeps chugging along. I don't have to worry a bout "can I really do this?" it just does it and I can focus on "what can I do to make it better" essentially.

For me it's beyond "porn coding" its basically fulfilling my vision that's been locked away for years but I've had no time to sit down and do it fully. I can tell Claude to do something, my kid comes up and asks me to go draw with them and I can actually just walk away and look at the output and refine.

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#217

Post by oblio »

patates wrote: post #68
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.…

> Coding assistants are also really great at porting from one language to the other I had a broken, one-off Perl script, a relic from the days when everyone thought Drupal was the future (long time ago). It was originally designed to migrate a site from an unmaintained internal CMS to Drupal. The CMS was ancient and it only ran in a VM for "look what we built a million years ago" purposes (I even had written permissi…

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

Pardon me, and, yes, I know we're on HN, but I guess you're... rich? I imagine a single run like this probably burns through tens or hundreds of dollars. For a joke, basically.

I guess I understand why some people really like AI :-)

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#218

Post by tonyedgecombe »

snowhale wrote: post #138
Fervicus wrote: post #123

> 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. I wonder what kind of tech debt this brings and if the trade off will be worth whatever problems they were having with C++.

[dead]

Yes, I just translated a Rust library from non-idiomatic and unsafe Rust to idiomatic and safe Rust and it was as much work as if I had rewritten it from scratch.

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#219

Post by kneel25 »

> After the initial translation, I ran multiple passes of adversarial review, asking different models to analyze the code for mistakes and bad patterns.

I feel like you just know it’s doomed. What this is saying is “I didn’t want to and cannot review the code it generated” asking models to find mistakes never works for me. It’ll find obvious patterns, a tendency towards security mistakes, but not deep logical errors.

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#220

Post by [deleted] »

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…

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