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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

#621

Post by srcreigh »

jacobr1 wrote: post #580
srcreigh wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, th…

That's a given, and agents still come out 2-10x slower in my experience.

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#622

Post by GaggiX »

Deanoumean wrote: post #616

Lol this dude is incapable of finishing anything he starts. Always a million distractions. First he started an OS called Serenity, then abandoned that to start a programming language (Jank or something) then abandoned that to work on a web browser, now it's looking like he is looking for things to distract away from that... A shame really.

He is working on the web browser.

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#623

Post by srcreigh »

mr_mitm wrote: post #590
srcreigh wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re "is fast as can be": in my experience generating C/Zig code via Codex, agent generated code is usually several multiples slower than hand optimized code.

Look, it's an RSS reader, not a numeric solver for PDEs. What I clearly meant was: Every interaction is instant, no noticable delay at all, except the reader view, which makes a network request to an external site.

Hey, sorry, I just have to defuse assumptions people make when they see Rust, LLMs, and "as fast as can be" in short proximity. Your project is obviously cool, and I don't think the fact that it's likely still multiples more resource intensive than an absolutely minimal version takes away from that.

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#624

Post by srcreigh »

josephg wrote: post #542
srcreigh wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re "is fast as can be": in my experience generating C/Zig code via Codex, agent generated code is usually several multiples slower than hand optimized code.

Yeah, I’m sure my Claude generated email client could be even faster if I wrote it by hand. Modern computers can retire billions of instructions per second per core. All operations that aren’t downloading or processing gigabytes of data should be instant on modern computers. Claude’s toy email client gets closer to the speed limit than Gmail does. Why is Gmail so slow? I have no idea.

I find the sweet spot is to take LLM generated code, then profile manually and heavily supervise or hand implement specific improvements.

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#625

Post by drnick1 »

pelagicAustral wrote: post #151
throwaway2037 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair point. What does Ladybird need to achieve in your opinion to shake the "hype" label? Honestly, I, myself, don't have a good answer!

> What does Ladybird need to achieve in your opinion to shake the "hype" label? A release (?)

I mean you can build and try Ladybird for yourself. I posted on HN from it a while back.

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#627

Post by roger110 »

"The web platform object model inherits a lot of 1990s OOP flavor, with garbage collection, deep inheritance hierarchies, and so on. Rust’s ownership model is not a natural fit for that."

I'm confused about this part. What part of the browser did they want GC and inheritance for? I'd get it if they were writing the UI in this, but the rest of this post is about the JS engine. They weren't going to 1:1 map JS objects to Swift objects and rely on ARC to manage memory, were they?

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#628

Post by xpe »

ZoomZoomZoom wrote: post #571
rjh29 wrote: post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nothing wrong with being wary, generally speaking.*

There are many examples of good engineers that are also good leaders. I think the Venn overlap isn't that unusual, at least for a good engineer leading a team up to maybe a dozen. When a good engineer lands in a spot where they get to work on something they really care about, that doesn't hurt either!

Now, how many good engineers are also good at leading larger teams? As the team size increases, my impression is that it is less common. If so, why? Lots to explore around individual, cultural, and corporate factors.

* If one sets a prior probability to 0 or 1, a posterior probability will not change due to Bayes' Rule. This means new information has no effect. Put another way, choosing either 0 or 1 as a prior is equivalent to stating "no new information will change my belief."

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#629

Post by tomhow »

alpinisme wrote: post #28
mosura wrote: post #4

Interestingly editorialized title omits “with help from AI”.

That’s probably just the classic HackerNews title shortening algorithm at work.

It wasn't. The submitter submitted it with the title “Ladybird Browser adopts Rust”. We initially changed it to “Ladybird adopts Rust”, and now I've changed it to the original title, per the guidelines. The automatic title cleaner wouldn't make a change like that.

Re: Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI

#630

Post by tomhow »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #163
alpinisme wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s probably just the classic HackerNews title shortening algorithm at work.

> classic HackerNews title shortening algorithm Woah, this is a wild claim. @dang: Is this a thing? I don't believe it. I, myself, have submitted many articles and never once did I see some auto-magical "title shortening algorithm" at work!

It's not exactly an auto-magical "title shortening algorithm"; just a simple software function that cleans up titles by removing common title patterns that are baity, abusive, ugly or superfluous.

It wasn't the cause of this change; the submitter submitted it without the “with help from AI” part, for some reason.

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