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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

#221

Post by pjmlp »

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…

There are plenty of SMEs trapped into that future. :)

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#222

Post by abuyalip »

panstromek wrote: post #100
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.

> Modern C++ pretty much solves the safety issues. I always wonder how can one come to such a conclusion. Modern C++ has no way to enforce relationship between two objects in memory and the shared xor mutable rule, which means it can't even do the basic checks that are the foundation of Rust's safety features. Of course, this statement is also trivially debunked by the reality of any major C++ program with complexity…

Yeah sure. Thing is, C does just fine people are making “safe” ways to run libc. Rust is a complicated monstrosity with a bunch of “unsafe” sprinkles.

What does the memory safety even matter when hackers poison heavily used crates?

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#223

Post by embedding-shape »

freeopinion wrote: post #167
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…

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 i…

To be honest, I'm not quite sure what the ideal UX looks like yet. The AI assisted autocomplete is too little, but the idea of saying "Build X for purpose Y" is too high-level. Maintaining Markdown documents that the AI implements, also feels too high-level, but letting the human fully drive the implementation probably again too low-level.

I'm guessing the direction I'd prefer, would be tooling built to accept and be driven by humans, but allowed to be extended/corrected by AI, or something like that, maybe.

Maybe a slight contradiction, and very wish-washy/hand-wavey, but I haven't personally quite figured out what I think would be best yet either, what the right level actually is, so probably the best I could say right now :) Sorry!

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#224

Post by pjmlp »

staticassertion wrote: post #168
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.

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.

Formal specifications and automated testing, will beat any language specific tooling.

Hardly much different than dealing with traditional offshoring projects output.

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#225

Post by blibble »

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…

> Agree, and it's also such a shame that none of the AI companies actually focus on that way of using AI.

their valuations are replaced on getting rid of you entirely, along with everyone else

the "humans can use it to increase their productivity" is an interim step

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#226

Post by GoblinSlayer »

panstromek wrote: post #100
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.

> Modern C++ pretty much solves the safety issues. I always wonder how can one come to such a conclusion. Modern C++ has no way to enforce relationship between two objects in memory and the shared xor mutable rule, which means it can't even do the basic checks that are the foundation of Rust's safety features. Of course, this statement is also trivially debunked by the reality of any major C++ program with complexity…

FWIW Chrome includes third party libraries like freetype and lots of bugs are in javascript. I imagine defensive checks in javascript will be controversial since performance of javascript is controlled by webdev, not by browser.

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#227

Post by boxed »

smartmic wrote: post #90
ramon156 wrote: post #38

I'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…

I am somewhat concerned about the volatility. All three languages have their merits and each has a stable foundation that has been developed and established over many years. The fact that the programming language has been “changed” within a short period of time, or rather that the direction has been altered, does not inspire confidence in the overall continuity of Ladybird's design decisions.

There's been some fun volatility with the author over the years. I told him once that he might want to consider another language to which he replied slightly insultingly. Then he tried to write another language. Then he tried to switch from C++ to Swift, and now to Rust :P

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#229

Post by herrkanin »

kneel25 wrote: post #219

> 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.

Your argument is just as applicable on human code reviewers. Obviously having others review the code will catch issues you would never have thought of. This includes agents as well.
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