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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

#491

Post by ozgrakkurt »

ZoomZoomZoom wrote: post #192

Looks 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…

This looks like guerrilla advertising for sure.

LLM and rust rewrite together. And it does work so hopefully they get more attention and build it so I have an alternative browser to use

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#492

Post by written-beyond »

zamalek wrote: post #341
SatvikBeri wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, he's given an interview where he talks about the Swift decision. He and several maintainers tried building some features in Swift, Rust, and C++, spending about two weeks on each one IIRC. And all the maintainers liked the experience of Swift better. That might have ended up wrong, but it's a pretty reasonable way to make a decision.

Two weeks with Rust and you're still fighting with the compiler. I think the LLM pulled a lot of weight selling the language, it can help smooth over the tricky bits.

idk man it's rare to fight the compiler once you've used Rust for long enough unless you're doing something that's the slightest bit complex with async.

You get to good at schmoozing the compiler you start to create actual logical bugs faster.

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#493

Post by ukblewis »

ozgrakkurt wrote: post #478
cyode wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope, with the velocity unlocked by these tools, that more pure ports will become the norm. Before, migrations could be so costly that “improving” things “while I’m here” helped sell doing the migration at all, especially in business settings. Only to lead to more toil chasing those phantom bugs.

One of the biggest point of rewriting is you know better by then so you create something better. This is a HUUUGE reason code written in rust tended to be so much better than the original (which was probably written in c++). Human expertise is the single most important factor and is more important than language. Copy pasting from one language to another is way worse than complete rewrite with actual idiomatic and use…

It depends on your goals. If your only initial goal is to ensure the safety of your code, and that is rather important for a browser!

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#494

Post by hsaliak »

tarasglek wrote: post #424
hsaliak wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the way. This exact workflow is my sweet spot. In my coding agent std::slop I've optimized for this workflow https://github.com/hsaliak/std_slop/blob/main/docs/mail_mode... basically the idea is that you are the 'maintainer' and you get bisect safe, git patches that you review (or ask a code reviewer skill or another agent to review). Any change re-rolls the whole stack. Git already supports such a flow and I…

your patch queue approach is very clever. Solves a huge tech debt poblem with llm code gen. Should work with jujitsu too probably. Would be curious to see more about how you save tokens with lua too. Do you blog?

Thanks for your interest in this work - I do not blog(maybe I should?) but i have posted a bit more on X about this work.

- A bit more on mail mode https://x.com/hsaliak/status/2020022329154420830

- on the Lua integration https://x.com/hsaliak/status/2022911468262350976 (I've since disabled the recursion, not every code file is long and it seems simpler to not do it), but the rest of it is still there

- hotwords for skill activation https://x.com/hsaliak/status/2024322170353037788

Also /review and /feedback. /feedback (the non code version) opens up the LLM's last response in an editor so you can give line by line comments. Inspired by "not top posting" from mailing lists.

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#495

Post by LoganDark »

pkulak wrote: post #429
virgil_disgr4ce wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm contemplating diving into Rust for a smallish project, a daemon with super-basic UI intended for Linux, MacOS and Windows. Do you mind expanding on what disadvantages you encountered? Or use-cases that aren't appropriate for Rust?

It's all the stuff that people always mention; they are not wrong. You spend a decent amount of time... conversing with the compiler about lifetimes and, in my experience, even more so about the type system, which is _extremely_ complicated. But you also have to keep in mind that Rust got very popular, very fast, and the tail end of something like that is always a negative reaction. The language is the same, despite…

I find Rust's complexity freeing, in that there are often at least a few ways to express what I want, and I can choose the one I feel best fits the use-case and my desired ergonomics. (I also like that there are often ways to express exactly a very precise want, owing well to the Rust principle of "zero-cost abstractions.") However of course, that very same complexity can make it unclear which approach may best serve a given objective, and lead to false starts, wacky implementations, or even giving up entirely.

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#496

Post by JetSetIlly »

refsys wrote: post #471
JetSetIlly wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 want less ambitious LLM powered tools than what's being offered. For example, I'd love a tool that can analyse whether comments have been kept up to date with the code they refer to. I don't wan…

Any terminal tool like Claude Code or Codex (I assume OpenCode too, but I haven't tried) can do it, by using as a prompt pretty much exactly what you wrote, and if it still wants to edit, just don't approve the tool calls. One problem I've noticed is that both claude models and gpt-codex variants make absolutely deranged tool calls (like `cat > foo...EOF` pattern to create a file, or sed to read a couple lines), so i…

"Any terminal tool like Claude Code or Codex (I assume OpenCode too, but I haven't tried) can do it, by using as a prompt pretty much exactly what you wrote, and if it still wants to edit, just don't approve the tool calls."

I'm sure it can. I'd still like a single use tool though.

But that's just my taste. I'm very simple. I don't even use an IDE.

edit: to expand on what I mean. I would love it if there was a tool that has conquered the problem and doesn't require me to chat with it. I'm all for LLMs helping and facilitating the coding process, but I'm so far disappointed in the experience. I want something more like the traditional process but using LLMs to solve problems that would be otherwise difficult to solve computationally.

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#497

Post by jacquesm »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #400
virgil_disgr4ce wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm contemplating diving into Rust for a smallish project, a daemon with super-basic UI intended for Linux, MacOS and Windows. Do you mind expanding on what disadvantages you encountered? Or use-cases that aren't appropriate for Rust?

I'm not OP but here's my disadvantages. Rust is the way I earn my living, and also my open source tool of choice. And my background is 25 years of SWE career: 1. build / compile times can be atrocious 2. crates.io inherits the npm philosophy, which means fairly unmoderated space of third party deps and because the Rust stdlib doesn't have a lot in it, extensive third party crate (lib) usage is strong in Rust. As a re…

So many great and balanced comments in this thread.

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#498

Post by cmrdporcupine »

jacquesm wrote: post #497
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not OP but here's my disadvantages. Rust is the way I earn my living, and also my open source tool of choice. And my background is 25 years of SWE career: 1. build / compile times can be atrocious 2. crates.io inherits the npm philosophy, which means fairly unmoderated space of third party deps and because the Rust stdlib doesn't have a lot in it, extensive third party crate (lib) usage is strong in Rust. As a re…

So many great and balanced comments in this thread.

Sure, and I'm available to provide balance commentary for hire, too ;-)

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#500

Post by staticassertion »

ricardobeat wrote: post #324
staticassertion wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is sad to see. Node was originally one of the memory efficient options – it’s roots are solving the c10k problem. Mind sharing what libraries/frameworks you were using?

It was an express server. I don't think c10k is particularly interesting since it mostly just involves having cooperating scheduling. Doesn't really impact flat memory overhead etc. I mean, the binary for node alone, without any libraries etc, is larger than the produced rust binary.
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