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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

#451

Post by 0x457 »

hathawsh wrote: post #398
echelon wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's honest. If we can serialize our ideas to any language for durability, Rust is the way to go. It's not the best tool for the job for a lot of things, but if the LLMs make writing it as fast as anything else - whelp, I can't see any reason not to do it in Rust. If you get any language outputs "for free", Rust is the way to go. I've been using Claude to go ridiculously fast in Rust recently. In the pre-LLM years I…

While Rust is excellent, you must acknowledge that Rust has issues with compilation time. It also has a steep learning curve (especially around lifetimes.) It's much too early to say Rust is the "final" language, especially since AI is driving a huge shift in thinking right now. I used to think that I would never write C code again, but when I decided recently to build something that would run on ESP32 chips, I reali…

If you're programming for ESP, then embassy is the way to go in most cases. You don't need to learn much about lifetimes in most of the application code. Steep learning curve people refer it is "thing blow up at compile time vs runtime." It's easy to write JS or C that passes all tests and compiles and then wonderful blows up when you start using it. It just forces you to learn things you need to know at IMO right now.

My biggest problem with rust right now is enormous target/ dirs.

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#453

Post by DANmode »

card_zero wrote: post #65
gnfargbl wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is an opportunity to select some stupid words that you would like to hear repeated a million times. The process is like patiently nurturing a well-contained thing, so how about "egg coding"?

How about “engineering”?

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#454

Post by cmrdporcupine »

LeFantome wrote: post #418
VoxPelli wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Servo makes a whole lot more sense: https://servo.org/

Can you send a Gmail in Servo? No? Ladybird is much further ahead in terms of actually rendering web pages that people use. The biggest advantage to Servo was that it is written in Rust. This move begins to nullify that advantage as well. Why exactly does Servo make more sense? I hope they both succeed. But Ladybird is more likely to become a usable browser first.

This move was only to port a part of their JS runtime pieces to Rust, that's it.

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#455

Post by ignoramous »

simonw wrote: post #137
samiv wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Nearly 26 years ago! https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-... What's different today really is the LLMs and coding agents. The reason to never rewrite in another language is that it requires you to stop everything else for months or even years. Stopping for two weeks is a lot less likely to kill your project.

> What's different today really is the LLMs and coding agents.

In Ladybird's case, tests they could rely upon.

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#456

Post by shevy-java »

Some time ago I was perma-banned from the Ladybird github repository. One can say it is warranted, or not (people have their own opinion; I completely disagree with their decision). Now that this has happened, I can speak more freely about Ladybird.

Naturally this will be somewhat critical, but I need to first put things into context. I do believe that we really need an alternative to Google dominating our digital life. So I don't object that we need alternatives; whether Ladybird will be an alternative, or not, will be shown in the future. Most assuredly we need competition as otherwise the Google empire moves forward like Darth Vader and the empire (but nowhere near as cool as that; I find Google boring and lame. Even skynet in Terminator was more fun than Google. Google just annoys the heck out of me, but back to the topic of browsers).

So with that out of the way ... Ladybird is kind of ... erratic.

Some time ago, perhaps two months or three, Andreas suddenly announced "Swift WILL BE THE FOREVER FUTURE! C++ sucks!!!". People back then were scratching heads. It was not clear why Swift is suddenly our saviour.

Ok, now we learn - "wait ... swift is NOT the future, but RUST is!!!". Ok ... more head-scratching. We are having a deja-vu moment here... but it gets stranger:

"We previously explored Swift, but the C++ interop never quite got there, and platform support outside the Apple ecosystem was limited. Rust is a different story."

and then:

"I used Claude Code and Codex for the translation. This was human-directed, not autonomous code generation"

So ... the expertise will be with regards to ... relying on AI to autogenerate code in ... Rust.

I am not saying this is a 100% fail strategy, mind you. AI can generate useful code, we could see that. But I am beginning to have more and more doubts about the Ladybird project. Add to this the breakage of URLs that are used by thousands or million people world-wide (see the issues reported on the github tracker); or also the fact that, once you scale-up and more and more people use ladybird, will you be able to keep up with issue trackers? Will you ban more people?

In a way it is actually good that I am no longer allowed to make comments on their repository because I can now be a lot more critical and ask questions that the ladybird team will have to evaluate. Will ladybird blend? Will it succeed? Will it fail? Yes, it is way too early to make an evaluation, so we should evaluate in some months or so, perhaps end of this year. But I am pretty certain the criticism will increase, at the least the moment they decide to leave beta (or alpha or whatever model they use; they claimd they want a first working version in this year for Linux users, let's see whether that works).

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#459

Post by shevy-java »

latexr wrote: post #80
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…

> Ladybird praises CPP/Swift currently Not anymore. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47067678

They are moving fast.

Next month it will be yet-another-language.

Eventually they come full circle and settle for either C or C++.

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#460

Post by hu3 »

lukaslalinsky wrote: post #379
npn wrote: post #372

My intuition is that they will convert to zig again when it stables. If it is possible to do it using LLM in 2 weeks for rust, then it would be the same for zig, too. While rust is nice on paper, writting complex software in it is mentally consuming. You can not do it for a long time.

If they are looking for a memory-safe language, why would they convert to Zig?

If they do, it could be because safety is a gradient and one variable among many in software development, albeit a very important one when it comes to browsers.
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