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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

#571

Post by ZoomZoomZoom »

rjh29 wrote: post #562
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…

Andreas is not some kind of hustler. He spent years writing an entire OS (Serenity OS) before the web browser part happened to gain traction. If you were just trying to be an entrepreneur, why do that? The truth is more simple: he's a good engineer and leader, people recognised that and offered him sponsorships, and the project took off by itself.

I sincerely hope it's just me having trust issues.

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#572

Post by rjh29 »

jacquesm wrote: post #565
rjh29 wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sense of NIH is from Serenity, and that was probably the reason for Jakt's existence too. Now it's spun off into its own project there is a lot more pragmatism.

Well, here's to hoping because we really need a stand-in for FF. I realize the irony here in terms of that being the ultimate 'NIH' project but that one I can get behind because the browser landscape is much too fragile. Of course they might end up taking users away from FF rather than from Chrome, Edge or Safari.

In case you didn't know they're using a lot of third-party libraries now for pretty major things: libcurl for http, Skia/Harfbuzz for rendering, libxml, OpenSSL, ffmpeg, etc:

https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird/tree/8017f8a7ed3...

The core browser engine, JS/CSS/layout etc will always be original.

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#573

Post by easterncalculus »

metabeard wrote: post #119
josephg wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 10/10 - would generate tens of thousands of lines of useless code again. Me too! A couple days ago I gave claude the JMAP spec and asked it to write a JMAP based webmail client in rust from scratch. And it did! It burned a mountain of tokens, and its got more than a few bugs. But now I've got my very own email client, powered by the stalwart email server. The rust code compiles into a 2mb wasm bundle that does ever…

Please post this. I'd love to play with it and, especially, see how fast it is.

Seconding this comment, as someone who loves JMAP.

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#574

Post by metaltyphoon »

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…

> often with duplicated functionality (multiple Base64, rand, sha256, etc crates)

I don’t think this is true unless they differ in major versions no? Cargo will apply semantic versioning and pick the best available given the cargo.toml version constraints.

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#575

Post by zamadatix »

kneel25 wrote: post #524
zamadatix wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somehow they did use this as part of their approach to get to 0 regressions across 65k tests + no performance regressions though + identical output for AST and bytecode though. How much manual review was part of the hundreds of rounds of prompt steering is not stated, but I don't think it's possible to say it couldn't find any deep logical errors along the way and still achieve those results. The part that concerns m…

That’s convincing and impressive, but I wouldn’t say it proves it can spot deep errors. If it’s incredible at porting files and comparing against the source of truth then finding complicated issues isn’t being tested imo.

If completing the above successfully doesn't necessarily test these abilities then where does the concern about having these abilities come into play?

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#577

Post by tvshtr »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #466
0x457 wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 no…

> My biggest problem with rust right now is enormous target/ dirs. We're working on that and it should get better soonish. We're working on shared caches, as well as pruning of old cached builds of dependencies that are unlikely to be reused in a future build.

thanks beejesus! (aka the devs) I'm tired of forcing shit into workspaces just to slightly mitigate these issues

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#578

Post by nix-zarathustra »

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…

>assuming, browsers are his thing

IIRC he used to work on the Safari browser engine at Apple.

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#580

Post by jacobr1 »

srcreigh wrote: post #516
LoganDark wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given parent and GP are both using Claude... have you tried Claude? (I say this as someone who has not tried Claude recently. I did try Claude Code when it first came out, though.)

First, it is important for these discussions that people include details like I did. We're all better off to not generalize. RE: Claude Code, no I haven't used it, but I did do the Anthropic interview problem, beating all of Anthropic's reported Claude scores even with custom harnesses etc. It's not a dunk that agents can't produce "as fast as can be" code; their code is usually still reasonably fast; it's just often…

There is a lot to be done with good prompting.

Early on, these code agents wouldn't do basic good hygiene things, like check if the code compiled, avoid hallucinating weird modules, writing unit tests. And people would say they sucked ....

But if you just asked them to do those things: "After you write a file lint it and fix issues. After you finish this feature, write unit tests and fix all issues, etc ..."

Well, then they did that, it was great! Later the default prompts of these systems included enough verbiage to do that, you could get lazy again. Plus the models are are being optimized to know to do some of these things, and also avoid some bad code patterns from the start.

But the same applies to performance today. If you ask it to optimize for performance, to use a profiler, to analyze the algorithms and systemically try various optimization approaches ... it will do so, often to very good results.

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