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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

#501

Post by jacquesm »

oblio wrote: post #249
boxed wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's been some fun volatility with the author over the years. I told him once that he might want to consider another language to which he replied slightly insultingly. Then he tried to write another language. Then he tried to switch from C++ to Swift, and now to Rust :P

Upside: he's learning?

Indeed, and as a school those 18 months are well worth it, but it is in many ways also 18 months wasted. There is a strong sense of NIH with the Ladybird dev(s), and I wonder if that isn't their whole reason for doing this.

I've seen another team doing something similar, they went through endless rewrite cycles of a major package but never shipped, and eventually the project was axed when they proposed to do it all over again, but this time even better.

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#502

Post by pjmlp »

staticassertion wrote: post #483
pjmlp wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 langu…

It doesn't need to win the benchmarks Olympics, it needs to be fast enough.

Plenty of AI based tooling is already trying out this path.

Agents execute actions that in the past would be manually programmed applications, now tasks can be automated given a few mcp endpoints.

LLMs are already at the same output quality of lousy offshoring companies, thus having to fix a bit of it is something that unfortunately many of us are already used with fellow humans.

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#503

Post by zamalek »

written-beyond wrote: post #492
zamalek wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's why I said "two weeks."

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#504

Post by embedding-shape »

Sharlin wrote: post #357
Barbing wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Optimists will imagine it to one day be as taxing and thus as wasteful as firing up MS Paint. No that’s a stretch, but firing up a AAA game.

At least you (hopefully) get hours of entertainment from firing up an AAA game. Whereas generating vast amounts of code that you're never going to use has… some novelty value, I suppose. Luckily the novelty is going to wear off soon, I can't really see many people getting their daily happiness boost from making code machine say brrrrt straight to /dev/null. Even generating smut is a vastly more understandable (and va…

> I can't really see many people getting their daily happiness boost from making code machine say brrrrt straight to /dev/null

How long time do we have to wait before these people get bored? Or might they actually find what they generate useful and it doesn't all go straight to /dev/null, since seemingly it seems to gain usage, not drop in usage?

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#506

Post by jacquesm »

muyuu wrote: post #427
fmbb wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think the creator behind SerenityOS has no experience? I mean it’s not the most popular OS out there but he seems like a capable individual.

in case it's not glaringly obvious from the comment, he has plenty of cpp experience and little rust experience, and that's according to his own comments the relevant bit here is that he's porting from a language in which he has plenty of experience into another one in which he doesn't, in a large project that in itself sounds like putting a lot of faith in LLMs but maybe there are factors not mentioned here, which i…

Indeed, the hard part won't the port, but the maintenance of that which got ported. To be fair though, he's probably going to be able to use the same techniques for that.

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#507

Post by palata »

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…

> Copy pasting from one language to another is way worse than complete rewrite with actual idiomatic and useful code.

But translating with automated tools is a much faster experiment.

Sometimes (not always), rewriting from scratch ends up in a big loss of time and resources and never replaces the old version.

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#508

Post by basch »

echelon wrote: post #162
mr_mitm wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. I had Claude write me a web based RSS feed reader in Rust. It has some minor glitches I still need to iron out, but it works great, is fast as can be, and is easy on the eyes. https://github.com/AdrianVollmer/FluxFeed

Rust is the final language. Defect free. Immaculate types. Safe. Ergonomic. Beautiful to read. AI is going to be writing a lot of Rust. The final arguments of "rust is hard to write" are going to quiet down. This makes it even more accessible.

Rust may be the darling of the moment, but Erlang is oft slept on.

As AI makes human-readable syntax less relevant, the Erlang/Elixir BEAM virtual machine is an ideal compilation target because its "let it crash" isolated process model provides system-level fault tolerance against AI logic errors, arguably more valuable than Rust’s strict memory safety.

The native Actor Model simplifies massive concurrency by eliminating shared state and the complex thread management. BEAM's hot code swapping capability also enables a continuous deployment where an AI can dynamically rewrite and inject optimized functions directly into live applications with zero downtime.

Imagine a future where an LLM is constantly monitoring server performance, profiling execution times, and dynamically rewriting sub-optimal functions in real-time. With Rust, every optimization requires a recompile and a deployment cycle that interrupts the system.

Finally, Erlang's functional immutability makes deterministic AI reasoning easier, while its built-in clustering replaces complex external infrastructure, making it a resilient platform suited for automated iteration.

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#509

Post by jacquesm »

written-beyond wrote: post #492
zamalek wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That goes for almost every language. I recall my first couple of weeks with various compiled language and they all had their 'wtf?' moments when a tiny mistake in the input generated reams of output. But once you get past that point you simply don't make those mistakes anymore. Try missing a '.' in a COBOL program and see what happens. Make sure there is enough paper in the box under LPT1...

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#510

Post by jacquesm »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #498
jacquesm wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So many great and balanced comments in this thread.

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

I'm pretty sure you wouldn't like to work on what I'm working on right now though!
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