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developers with good taste like Andreas Kling will be able to design entire OSes with coding agents
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Secondly, Ladybird wants to be a fourth implementor in the web browsers we have today. Right now there's pretty much three browser engines: Blink, Gecko and WebKit (or alternatively, every browser is either Chrome, Firefox or Safari). Ladybird wants to be the fourth engine and browser in that list.
Servo also wants to be the fourth engine in that list, although the original goal was to remove Gecko and replace it with Servo (which effectively wouldn't change the fact there's only three browsers/three engines). Then Mozilla lost track of what it was doing[0] and discarded the entire Servo team. Nowadays Servo isn't part of Mozilla anymore, but they're clearly much more strapped for resources and don't seem to be too interested in setting up all the work to make a Servo-based browser.
The question of "why not use Servo" kinda has the same tone as "why are people contributing to BSD, can't they just use Linux?". It's a different tool that happens to be in the same category.
[0]: Or in a less positive sense, went evil.
i rememebr seeing interviews saying rust is not suited for this project because of recursion and dom tree. how they tested multiple languages and settled on swift. then they abandon swift and now they shift towards rust. this entire project starts to look like "how am i feeling today?" rather than a serious project.
So far this is the first and only shift
> 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.…
I decided to create a Claude skill called "teach". When I enable it, Claude never writes any code. It just gives me hints - progressively more detailed if I am stuck. Then it reviews what I write.
I am finding it very satisfying to work this way - Rust in particular is a language where there's little space to "wing it". Most language features are interlaced with each other and having an LLM supporting me helps a lot. "Let's not declare a type for this right now, we would have to deal with several lifetime issues, let's add a note to the plan and revisit this later".
> 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…
This is the famous trap that Joel on Software talked about in a blog post long time ago. If you do a rewrite you essentially put everything else on halt while rewriting. If you keep doing feature dev on the old while another "tiger team" is doing the rewrite port then these two teams are essentially in a race against each other and the port will likely never catch up. (Depending on relative velocities) Maybe they thi…
Ladybird appears to have the discipline to have recognized this: “[Rust] is not becoming the main focus of the project. We will continue developing the engine in C++, and porting subsystems to Rust will be a sidetrack that runs for a long time.”
> 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.…
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.
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 the meantime, we can just continue doing work with these new tools.
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 would make ladybird a lot less interested (at least to me).
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 stance is.
At least contributing will be a lot nicer from my end, because my PR's to Ladybird have been bad due to having no CPP experience. I had no idea what I was doing.
Interestingly editorialized title omits “with help from AI”.
I use AI more and more. Goes like create me classes A,B,C with such and such descriptive names, take this state machine / flowchart description to understand the flow and use this particular sets of helpers declared in modules XYZ
I then test the code and then go over and look at any un-optimal and other patterns I prefer not to have and asking to change those.
After couple of iterations code usually shines. I also cross check final results against various LLMs just in case