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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

#481

Post by LoganDark »

uyzstvqs wrote: post #245
patates wrote: post #68

Earlier 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. This is the biggest bottleneck at this point. I'm looking forward to RAM production increasing, and getting to a point where every high-end PC (workstation & gaming) has a dedicated NPU next to the GPU. You'll be able to do this kind of stuff as much as you want, using any local model you want. Run a…

I bet RAM production will only increase to meet AI demand and there will be none left for you. Or me. Or anyone. Crucial is already going probably forever and I'm sure more will follow...

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#483

Post by staticassertion »

pjmlp wrote: post #297
staticassertion wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Formal specifications and automated testing, will beat any language specific tooling. I don't understand what you mean. Beat any language at what? Correctness? I don't think that's true at all, but I also don't see how that's relevant, it definitely doesn't address the fact that Rust will virtually always produce faster code than the majority of other languages. > Hardly much different than dealing with traditional…

Any tool that can plug into MLIR and use LLVM, can potentically produce fast code. Also there is the alternative path to execute code via agents workestration, just like low code tooling work. I see you never had the fortune to review code provided by cheap offshoring teams.

> Any tool that can plug into MLIR and use LLVM, can potentically produce fast code.

I guess that's sort of technically true, but not even really? Like, obviously you can compile Python to C and then compile that with clang, but it doesn't make it fast. But even if that were the case, there aren't that many languages that have Rust performance so who cares? "Potentially" is sort of saying we might have a future language that's better, but of course anyone would agree.

> Also there is the alternative path to execute code via agents workestration, just like low code tooling work.

I don't understand how this is relevant.

> I see you never had the fortune to review code provided by cheap offshoring teams.

I just don't understand why you're bringing it up tbh I don't understand the relevance.

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#484

Post by vunderba »

staticassertion wrote: post #118
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.…

I had a script in another language. It was node, took up >200MB of RAM that I wanted back. "claude, rewrite this in rust". 192MB of memory returned to me.

I used to have a bunch of bespoke node express server utilities that I liked to keep running in the background to have access to throughout the day but 40-50mb per process adds up quickly.

I’ve been throwing codex at them and now they’ve all been rewritten in Go - cut down to about 10mb per process.

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#485

Post by kayo_20211030 »

I don't get it, and I don't have a dog in the C/C++ vs. Rust race. Ladybird has ~1200 contributors with a predominance of C++ contributions, followed by HTML, and with "other" lying at 0.5%.

That's a lot of people contributing.

How many of them will be less willing to contribute in the future, and less productive when they do if a sizable portion is in Rust? Maybe there'll be more contributions and maybe there'll be less. I don't know. If you've managed to develop a community of 1200 developers who are willing to advance the project why upset the applecart?

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#486

Post by Barrin92 »

ivell wrote: post #339
axus wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agents are a "self-driving car for the mind". I don't enjoy or dislike driving, but lots of Americans love to drive. In the future they will lament their driving skills' decline.

We as the general population have consistently lost lots of skills from just 200 years back. Most likely we will not miss them (though coding used to be my hobby). Though if apocalypse happens and all of our built tech goes away, we are in for a serious survival issu.

>Most likely we will not miss them

given that we've also lost the faculty to look at the past with anything other than contempt most people wouldn't even know what they miss. The little problem with losing the 'general cognition' department, just like broad social or cultural decline is that you lose the ability to even judge what you're losing, because the thing you just lost was doing the judging

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#487

Post by Sharlin »

hathawsh wrote: post #408
Sharlin wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasting electricity to "generate tens of thousands of lines of useless code" at will? Why is that in any way a desirable future?

A lot of code is "useless" only in the sense that no one wants to buy it and it will never find its way into an end user product. On the other hand, that same code might have enormous value for education, research, planning, exploration, simulation, testing, and so on. Being able to generate reams of "useless" code is a highly desirable future.

Obviously "useful" doesn't just involve making money. Code that will be used for education and all of these things is clearly not useless.

But let's be honest to ourselves, the sort of useless code the GP meant will never ever be used for any of that. The code will never leave their personal storage. In that sense it's about as valuable for the society at large as the combined exabytes of GenAI smut that people have been filling their drives with by running their 4090s 24/7.

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#488

Post by lock1 »

9rx wrote: post #438
josephg wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only by abusing interface {}. The result is horrible. Go doesn’t have sum types as a first class primitive.

Using interface as it was designed to be used offers first-class sum types. Although not all interface use equates to sum types. But they're not tagged unions. I expect that is still where your confusion lies. Tagged unions and sum types are not equivalent. Tagged unions are a subset of sum types.

I'm curious, if tagged unions are a subset of sum type, what is your definition of "sum type"?

AFAIK, tagged union is sum type, based on sum type mathematical definition.

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#489

Post by NoboruWataya »

surajrmal wrote: post #248
throwaway2037 wrote: post #129

Fuck me. This is wild. Sorry for the potty mouth. > Porting LibJS > Our first target was LibJS , Ladybird’s JavaScript engine. The lexer, parser, AST, and bytecode generator are relatively self-contained and have extensive test coverage through test262, which made them a natural starting point. > Results > The requirement from the start was byte-for-byte identical output from both pipelines. The result was about 25,0…

Note that Firefox doesn't have market dominance. It is under 5% market share. That said I imagine Firefox users to be the most likely to make the jump. However, the web is a minefield of corner cases. It's hard to believe it will be enough to make the browser largely useful enough to be a daily driver.

Why do you think Firefox users would be most likely to make the jump? The main reason I see people give for supporting Ladybird is challenging the dominance of the incumbents. That's not really a great reason to switch from Firefox because, as you note, it doesn't have any dominance. And there's also an argument that splitting the non-Chrome market into two only increases Chrome's dominance.

From what I can tell from HN, Brave seems to be popular with those users who hate Google but for whatever reason hate Mozilla even more, and I suspect those will be the most likely users to switch.

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#490

Post by Sharlin »

flatline wrote: post #442
Sharlin wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasting electricity to "generate tens of thousands of lines of useless code" at will? Why is that in any way a desirable future?

One person's waste is another's value. Do you have any idea how "wasteful" tik tok or any other streaming platform is? I'll grant that AI is driving unprecedented data center development but it's far from the root cause, or even a leading clause, of our climate issues. I always find it strange that this is the first response so many have to AI, when it poses other more imminent existential threats IMO.

It was a reply to what the GP said about running local generation 24/7 for no good reason, just because it's possible (and electricity is too cheap, apparently). There are many more threats, but those are beside the point in this specific context.
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