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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

#61

Post by nicoburns »

nananana9 wrote: post #42
aero-glide2 wrote: post #11

Sigh agents keep killing all the passion I have for programming. It can do things way faster than me, and better than me in some cases. Soon it will do everything better and faster than me.

I'm not sure 25,000 lines translated in 2 weeks is "fast", for a naive translation between languages as similar as C++ and Rust (and Ladybird does modern RAII smart-pointer-y C++ which is VERY similar to Rust). You should easily be able to do 2000+ lines/day chunks.

Yeah, it also a lot that the person doing the translation is the lead developer of the project who is very familiar with the original version.

I imagine LLMs do help quite a bit for these language translation tasks though. Language translation (both human and programming) is one of the things they seem to be best at.

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#62

Post by michaelcampbell »

jvillasante wrote: post #37

> We’ve been searching for a memory-safe programming language to replace C++ in Ladybird for a while now. The article fails to explain why. What problems (besides the obvious) have been found in which "memory-safe languages" can help. Do these problems actually explain the need of adding complexity to a project like this by adding another language? I guess AI will be involved which, at this early point in the project…

> What problems (besides the obvious) have been found in which "memory-safe languages" can help.

Why isn't that enough?

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#63

Post by ursuscamp »

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…

They abandoned Swift recently.

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#64

Post by nu11ptr »

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.…

Quite good. I ported my codebase from Go to Rust in a fraction of the time it would have taken me to rewrite it.

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#65

Post by card_zero »

gnfargbl wrote: post #36
giancarlostoro wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is also how some of us use Claude despite what the haters say. You dont just go “build thing” you architect, review, refine, test and build.

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"?

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#66

Post by djoldman »

A lot of the previous calculus around refactoring and "rewrite the whole thing in a new language" is out the window now that AI is ubiquitous. Especially in situations where there is an extensive test suite.

Testing has become 10x as important as ever.

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#67

Post by michaelcampbell »

aero-glide2 wrote: post #11

Sigh agents keep killing all the passion I have for programming. It can do things way faster than me, and better than me in some cases. Soon it will do everything better and faster than me.

"I will never be a world class athlete, so I play for the love of the sport."

Helps me.

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#68

Post by patates »

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.…

> 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 permission from my ex-employer to keep that thing).

Just for a laugh, I fed this mess of undeclared dependencies and missing logic into Claude and told it to port the whole thing to Rust. It spent 80 minutes researching Drupal and coding, then "one-shotted" a functional import tool. Not only did it mirror the original design and module structure, but it also implemented several custom plugins based on hints it found in my old code comments.

It burned through a mountain of tokens, but 10/10 - would generate tens of thousands of lines of useless code again.

The Epilogue: That site has since been ported to WordPress, then ProcessWire, then rebuilt as a Node.js app. Word on the street is that some poor souls are currently trying to port it to Next.js.

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#70

Post by rausr »

I must admit to being somewhat confused by the article's claim that Rust and C++ emit bytecode. To my knowledge, neither do (unless they're both targeting WASM?) - is there something I'm missing or is the author just using the wrong words?

EDIT: bramhaag pointed out the error of my ways. Thanks bramhaag!

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