Great! I can't wait they totally ditch C++
Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI
231–240 of 731 posts
Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple actually did put some resources behind it, the toolchain is reasonably pleasant to use outside macOS and Xcode, they have people building an ecosystem in the Swift Server Workgroup, and arguably some recent language design decisions don't seem to be purely motivated by desktop/mobile usage. But in the end I can't help but feel Swift has become an absolute beast of a multi-paradigm language with even worse compi…
A language is more than a compiler. All of the Swift frameworks you would need to do anything actually useful or interesting in the language are macOS-only. You cannot develop in Swift for Windows/Linux/Android the way that you develop in Swift for macOS/iOS. That matters.
You don't need to convince me that Swift is poorly positioned there, but if you only care about server side (or possibly CLI) apps, the usable ecosystem on Linux isn't too shabby.
Does it make sense compared to C#, Go, Rust or a JVM language? I don't know, but it's there, and Apple put some resources behind the initiative.
Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If the offshore company provides me a Rust crate that compiles, that is already a lot of guarantee. Now that does not solve the logic issues and you still need testing.
But testing in Python is so easy to abuse as LLM. It will create mocks upon mocks of classes and dynamically patch functions to get things going. Its hell to review.
Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
> how some of us Operative word being “some”. The issue is that too many aren’t doing it that way. > You dont just go “build thing” Tell that to the overwhelming majority of posters discussing vibe coding, including on HN.
Sure, but they're going to be stuck writing software for yesterday's problems. As our tools become more powerful, we're going to unlock new problems and expectations that would be impossible or impractical to solve with yesterday's tooling.
>Sure, but they're going to be stuck writing software for yesterday's problems
As long as they get paid for it (or have fun, if it's a personal project), they couldn't care less about that. Tomorrow's problems are overrated.
Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI
#235I'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 guess more anti-hype, where Rust was the hype
Yeah that is the thing I struggle with. I am really happy for people falling in love with Rust. It is a amazing language when used for the right use case.
The problem is that had my Rust adventures a few years ago and I am over the hype cycle and able to see both the advantages and disadvantages. Plus being generally older and hopefully wiser I don't tie my identity towards any specific programming language that much.
So sometimes when some Junior dev discovers Rust and they get really obnoxious with their evangelicalism it can be very off putting. Really not sure how to solve it. It is good when people get excited about a language. It just can be very annoying for everyone else sometimes.
Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 :-)
It was below 100$, but only after burning through the 20x max session limit.
Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI
#237Looks 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…
> but all of this makes me slightly wary. Wary of what?
I'd say it's the idea/fact/feeling that, in 2026, agency matters more than skill/wisdom/intelligence.
Long read on the topic (quite funny, covers Cluely): https://harpers.org/archive/2026/03/childs-play-sam-kriss-ai...
Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI
#238> 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.
>Your argument is just as applicable on human code reviewers.
The tests many of us use for how capable a model or harness is is usually based around whether they can spot logical errors readily visible to humans.
Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 :-)
The subsidized Codex/Claude subscriptions make it not so bad.
Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI
#240Porting the JS parser to Rust and adopting Rust in other parts of the engine while continuing to use C++ heavily is unlikely to make Ladybird meaningfully more secure.
Attackers are surprisingly resilient to partial security.