hckrnws

The byte-for-byte identical output requirement is the smartest part of this whole thing. You basically get to run the old and new pipelines side by side and diff them, which means any bug in the translation is immediately caught. Way too many rewrites fail because people try to "improve" things during the port and end up chasing phantom bugs that might be in the old code, the new code, or just behavioral differences.

Also worth noting that "translated from C++" Rust is totally fine as a starting point. You can incrementally make it more idiomatic later once the C++ side is retired. The Rust compiler will still catch whole classes of memory bugs even if the code reads a bit weird. That's the whole point.

  > Way too many rewrites fail because people try to "improve" things during the port

I think the last one gets ignored easily but my favorite time to document code is when reading it (but the best time is when writing it). It forces you to think explicitly about what the code is doing and makes it harder for the little things to slip by. Given that Ladybird is a popular project I really do think good documentation is a way to accelerate its development. Good documentation means new people can come in and contribute faster and with fewer errors. It lowers the barrier to entry, substantially. It's also helpful for all the mere mortals who forget things

LLMs are great at producing documentation - ask one "hey can you add a TODO comment about the thing on line 847 that is probably not the best way to do this?" while you're working on the port, and it will craft a reasonably-legible comment about that thing without further thought from you, that will make things easier for the person (possibly future-you) looking at the codebase for improvements to make. Meanwhile, you keep on working on the port that has byte-for-byte identical output.

If I’m writing that anyway, to tell the LLM, why wouldn’t I just write the comment myself?

I guess to have the LLM write a lengthy descrption of why the code is bad? Otherwise it doesn't make sense to ask an LLM instead of typing // TODO: bad coding style.

Why do I want length? Good docs are terse. Longer isn't better. When I read docs I want to get to know the developer and what they're thinking. I want to see their vision, not their calculator. It's not about quantity, it's about quality.

Just give your users and fellow devs some basic respect. I mean would you be okay with me just handing our conversation over to an LLM? Honestly I'd be insulted if you did that. Why is this any different? Docs are how you communicate to users and fellow developers

Concision is one of several virtues in documentation, and it trades off against thoroughness. I don't actually want to get to know the developer when I read a comment in some piece of code I am reading or editing, I want to as quickly and accurately as possible understand what I need to know about that code to make the changes I care about at that time.

Anyway I personally have asked LLMs to create more detailed TODO items for myself, on personal projects where I am the only human programmer who had laid eyes on the code. In fact, I do this frequently, including multiple times earlier today. So I don't take the idea seriously that using an LLM to generate a TODO comment is an inherently disrespectful thing to do.

I didn't say that length was a requirement, I was only thinking about why one would want to use an LLM to write a comment that is only a few words long, while the prompt might be as long as the (short version of the) comment itself.

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 useful code.

Best option after proper rewrite is binding. And copy-paste with LLM comes way below these options imo.

If you look at real world, basically all value is created by boring and hated languages. Because people spent so much effort on making those languages useful, and other people spent so much effort learning and using those languages.

Don’t think anyone would prefer to work in a rust codebase that an LLM copy-pasted from c++, compared to working on a c++ codebase written by actual people that they can interact with.

> 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.

I've seen more than a few rewrite attempts fail throughout the years. However, I've never seen a direct language to language translation fail. I've done several of these personally: from perl to ruby, java to kotlin, etc.

Step 1 of any rewrite of a non-trivial codebase should should be parity. You can always refactor to make things more idiomatic in a later phase.

I rewrote two times my personal tool, one to rust, and out of rust with LLM, I mainly "vibe code" for reasons but the tool is more complete and less buggy than most B2B and enterprise business or IT software that I have seen in 20years at different fortune 100.

I feel the effort and frustration to have parity with LLM is more than doing a full rewrite without.

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!

These are two different kinds of rewrites, for two different kinds of codebases, in two different situations. The important thing is to know which kind of rewrite you're doing, and have the whole team onboard.

The sort of rewrite you're talking about can work well at an early stage of a project, in the spirit of Fred Brooks's "plan to throw one away". But for a mature browser like Ladybird that's trying to not break the user experience, it's much better to have a pure translation step, and then try to improve or refactor it later.

That reminds me of the "Strangler Fig" pattern where you replace a service by first sending the requests to both the old and new implementation so you can compare their outputs. Then only when you're confident the new service functions as expected do you actually retire the old service.

The key part of the strangler fig is the facade and gradual migration of capabilities rather than trying to do a rewrite and swap (which never ends well).

I did several web framework conversions exactly like this. Make sure the http output string matches in the new code exactly as the old code and then eventually deleted the old code with full confidence.

Works even better if you have a good test suite, which is surely the case here with Ladybird

Really like this translation approach and I had written about it just couple of days back (more from a testing and validation context). To see folks take that approach to something complex is pretty amazing! https://balanarayan.com/2026/02/20/gen-ai-time-to-focus-on-l...

> 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. > The requirement from the start was byte-for-byte identical output from both pipelines. The result was about 25,000 lines of Rust, and the entire port took about two weeks. The same work would have taken me multiple months to do by hand. We’ve verified that every AST produced by the Rust parser is identical to the C++ one, and all bytecode generated by the Rust compiler is identical to the C++ compiler’s output. Zero regressions across the board

This is the way. Coding assistants are also really great at porting from one language to the other, especially if you have existing tests.

> 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.

> 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 everything client side. Its somehow insanely fast. Honestly, its the fastest email client I've ever used by far. Everything feels instant.

I don't need my own email client, but I have one now. So unnecessary, and yet strangely fun.

Its quite a testament to JMAP that you can feed the RFC into claude and get a janky client out. I wonder what semi-useless junk I should get it to make next? I bet it wouldn't do as good a job with IMAP, but maybe if I let it use an IMAP library someone's already made? Might be worth a try!

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

Haha glad to see someone else did something like this. A couple weeks ago I asked Claude to recommend a service that would allow me to easily view a local .xml file as an RSS feed. It instead built a .html RSS viewer.

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.

You can also let the agent use a profiling tool. It probably cannot beat you, but does find and improve a lot of things for sure.

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.

you have to ask it to profile and optimize the code for you. Then have it document the changes and run it in a loop. It’ll do wonders.

I asked a cursor agent to do the same for a geotiff to pmtiles converter. It managed to optimize the performance from tens of days to half a day for the case I wanted to solve.

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 2-10x slower than can be.

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.

Yep. Claude code is best thought of as an overachieving junior / mid. It can run off and do all sorts of work on its own, but it doesn't have great instincts and it can't read your mind about what you want.

Use it as if you're the tech lead managing a fresh hire. Tell it clearly what you want it to focus on and you get a much better result.

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

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 is the final language.

> Defect free.

I am an upstream developer on the Rust Project (lang, library, cargo, others), and obviously a big fan of Rust. This kind of advocacy doesn't help us, and in fact makes our jobs harder, because for some people this kind of advocacy is their main experience of people they assume are representative of Rust. Please take it down a notch.

I think Rust is the best available language for many kinds of problems. Not yet all, but we're always improving it to try to work for more people. It gets better over time. I'd certainly never call it, or almost any other software, "defect free".

And I'd never call it "the final language"; we're building it to last the test of time, and we hope things like the edition system mean that the successor to Rust is a future version of Rust, but things can always change, and we're not the only source of great ideas.

If you genuinely care about Rust, please adjust your advocacy of Rust to avoid hurting Rust and generating negative perceptions of Rust.

I’d also add: as a lover of forward progress, I really hope rust isn’t the last good idea programming language designers have. I love rust. But there are dozens of things I find a bit frustrating. Unfortunately I don’t think I’m clever & motivated enough to write a whole new language to try to improve it. But I really hope someone else is!

For a taste: I wish we didn’t need lifetime annotations, somehow. I wish rust had first class support for self borrows, possibly via explicit syntax indicating that a variable is borrowed, and thus pinned. Unpin breaks my brain, and I wish there were ways to do pin projections without getting a PhD first. I wish for async streams. I wish async executors were in std, and didn’t take so long to compile. I could go on and on.

I feel like there’s an even simpler & more beautiful language hiding inside rust. I can’t quite see it. But I really hope someone else can bring it into the world some day.

> For a taste: I wish we didn’t need lifetime annotations, somehow. I wish rust had first class support for self borrows, possibly via explicit syntax indicating that a variable is borrowed, and thus pinned. Unpin breaks my brain, and I wish there were ways to do pin projections without getting a PhD first. I wish for async streams. I wish async executors were in std, and didn’t take so long to compile. I could go on and on.

I would like all of that as well. I think we can do much of that in Rust. I would love to see self-borrows available, and not just via pinning; I would also like relative pointers. I would like people to almost never have to think about pin or unpin; one of my rules of thumb is that if you see Pin or Poll, you've delved too deep, and nobody should need those to write almost any async code, including the interiors of trait implementations and async runtime implementations. And I would absolutely like to see async iterators, async executors, and many kinds of async traits in the standard library.

I also think there are plenty of things we are unlikely to get to even in an edition, and that might never happen without a completely different language. I'm not sure if we'll find a path to doing those in Rust, or if they will be the domain of some future language that makes different trade-offs.

> I also think there are plenty of things we are unlikely to get to even in an edition, and that might never happen without a completely different language.

Yes, this is my feeling too. All programming languages - perhaps, all computer programs - must decide how malleable they should be. Fast moving systems are exciting, but they're very annoying to use, or build on top of. I think generally we want a very slow moving language for infrastructure software, like databases or the linux kernel. Slow moving languages are often good for users, because they don't need to learn new things or rewrite existing software. (I think thats one of the reasons python3 was so poorly received.)

It might be too late for large changes in rust. This a sign of maturity, but its also a little bit sad. I want all those features you mention too.

Some day. Maybe LLMs will help somehow. Rust is, thankfully, not the last programming language humans will invent.

As a member of t-compiler, seconded.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

I'm sorry my autistic elation for Rust is perceived as being over the top, but I truly do mean everything I say. I could have articulated it in a less saccharine tone.

> > Defect free.

There's a Google talk on the matter. "Defect rate" / "defect free" is a term that is used quite a bit. I've latched onto this, because I find it true. Rust is a far more defect free language on a line by line basis measured and compared to other statically typed languages.

> And I'd never call it "the final language"

I honestly disagree, and I'm sticking to this prediction.

I don't think we're going to be writing code much longer by ourselves. The machines are going to outpace us soon.

Maybe something that's LLM-oriented will take over, but at that point these won't be "human" languages anymore. So I'll revise my claim to "Rust is the last human language".

If I want to serialize my thoughts to code, Rust is the language for it. It's probably the last one I'll be hand-writing or sending my revisions back to the LLM for.

Rust will also be an order of magnitude easier to author, at which point there shouldn't be much holding people back from producing it. If you have a choice between generating Java, C++, Go, or Rust, you're going to pick Rust almost every time unless you have to fit into those other ecosystems.

If you haven't used Claude or Codex with Rust, it's sublime and you should drop what you're doing to try it.

> Beautiful to read.

Oh my, there's a new language called Rust? Didn't they know there already is one? The old one is so popular that I can't imagine the nicely readable one to gain any traction whatsoever (even if the old one is an assault on the senses).

> Rust is the final language.

I honestly can't tell if this is a humorous attack or not.

Poe's law is validated once again.

It's honest. If we can serialize our ideas to any language for durability, Rust is the way to go.

It's not the best tool for the job for a lot of things, but if the LLMs make writing it as fast as anything else - whelp, I can't see any reason not to do it in Rust.

If you get any language outputs "for free", Rust is the way to go.

I've been using Claude to go ridiculously fast in Rust recently. In the pre-LLM years I wrote a lot of Rust, but it definitely was a slow to author language. Claude helps me produce it as fast as I can think. I spend most of my time reviewing the code and making small fixes and refactors. It's great.

While Rust is excellent, you must acknowledge that Rust has issues with compilation time. It also has a steep learning curve (especially around lifetimes.) It's much too early to say Rust is the "final" language, especially since AI is driving a huge shift in thinking right now.

I used to think that I would never write C code again, but when I decided recently to build something that would run on ESP32 chips, I realized there wasn't any good reason for me to use Rust yet. ESP-IDF is built on C and I can write C code just fine. C compiles quickly, it's a very simple language on the surface, and as long as you minimize the use of dynamic memory allocation and other pitfalls, it's reliable.

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 now.

My biggest problem with rust right now is enormous target/ dirs.

> 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

I feel compilation time is unbearable in Rust, even on MacBook pro M3 max, don't get me started on space

I'll just stick with C as my lingua franca, and won't be involving Microsoft in my programming life, thanks.

are you implying that using Rust involves using MS products?

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Anthropic? ChatGPT is the one affiliated with Microsoft.

Not Microsoft.

You’re thinking of OpenAI and ChatGPT, which has a (now-rocky) partnership with Microsoft.

Claude is an Anthropic offering.

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> It's honest.

It's not, nor is it well informed. People are currently developing languages specifically for use by LLMs.

> It's not the best tool for the job for a lot of things

Then how could it possibly be the final language?

> if the LLMs make writing it as fast as anything else - whelp, I can't see any reason not to do it in Rust

This has nothing to do with the claim that it's the final language.

What did I say that is false?

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Sometimes I forget programming languages aren't a religion, and then I see someone post stuff like this. Programming languages really do inspire some of us to feel differently.

I would say it's overall the best existing language, probably due to learning from past mistakes. On the whole it wins via the pro/con sum. But ... Still loads of room for improvement! Far from a perfect lang; just edges out the existing alternatives by a bit.

I'd say that it's taking much needed steps to achieve perfection but many more steps are there ahead. The next language closer to perfection would definitely have a much gentler introduction curve, among other things.

Which coding assistant do you think needs a gentle introduction curve?

Needs monads (not joking)

If AI gets sufficiently good what will be the point of rust? I can just whip out some C code, tell the AI to make it safe (or just ask it if the code contains any undefined behavior), done.

Working code talks.

Bullshit walks.

Why not go full functional programming at that point? If the main issue with FP has been accessibility, then it should really take off now.

When you do fully value-oriented programming in Rust (i.e. no interior mutability involved) that's essentially functional programming. There's mutable, ephemeral data involved, but it's always confined to a single well-defined context and never escapes from it. You can even have most of your code base be sans-IO, which is the exact same pattern you'd use in Haskell.

I actually like rust more than Haskell, but `You can even have most of your code base be sans-IO, which is the exact same pattern you'd use in Haskell.` glosses over the fact that in Haskell it's enforced at compile time.

Another argument as to why rust isn't the forever-language. My forever language should include effects!

Even rust has need of this. For example, I want a nopanic effect I can put on a function which makes it a compile error for anything that function calls to panic.

Though I think it's the closest language right now, ideally you have something that is close to "zero-overhead" as your forever language.

I really like how flix.dev looks, but there's always a little nagging at the back of my head that something like rust will always produce more performant software.

> Even rust has need of this. For example, I want a nopanic effect I can put on a function which makes it a compile error for anything that function calls to panic.

This!

This apart from build times is my biggest request for the language.

Nopanic, nomalloc, etc.

I wouldn’t because idiomatic Haskell is way slower than idiomatic Rust.

Isn’t Rust a pretty good functional language? It has most of the features that enable safe, correct code without being anal about immutability and laziness that make performance difficult to predict.

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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.

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.

Code is here: https://github.com/josephg/claude-mail

The JMAP client itself is hosted here: https://seph.au/claude-webmail/

I can't prove this but its a purely static web app. You need a jmap server to use it. If you use stalwart, set:

    server.listener.http.permissive-cors = true

    server.listener.https.permissive-cors = true

Just curious, does it look anything like this library?

https://docs.rs/jmap-client/latest/jmap_client/

Also curious why would one be proud of having an LLM rewrite something that there is already a library for. I personally feel that proud LLM users boasting sounds as if they are on amphetamines.

It made a webmail client. Not a jmap library.

Not sure I understand, wouldn’t a webmail client in rust need client code like this or to use a library like this?

Yeah but it’s like saying, “why are you impressed with Claude making a car when there are plans for an engine online?”. Even if Claude used that code (it didn't), it made the whole car. Not just an engine. There’s a lot more stuff going on than simply calling a backend mail server over jmap.

And fyi, jmap is just a protocol for doing email over json & http. It’s not that hard to roll your own. Especially in a web browser.

Your initial claim talked about jmap and this looks to me like a full implementation of the RFC in rust. That is the hard part of an email client IMO so I’m not sure I’d agree with your analogy, but you’re saying it made a web app which called a library like this?

Would be interesting to see it, did you publish it yet?

> looks to me like a full implementation of the RFC in rust

Only the client parts. And only the client parts its actually using. JMAP clients can be much simpler than servers. A JMAP server needs the whole protocol. JMAP clients only need to implement the parts they use. Servers also need to parse email message envelopes - which is way more difficult to do correctly than people think. JMAP clients can just use pre-parsed messages from the server.

Anyway, the code is here if you wanna take a look:

https://github.com/josephg/claude-mail

Claude put its JMAP API wrapper code in a child crate (confusingly also called jmap-client).

Cool thanks.

Interesting! I am getting tired of looking at Roundcube and having weird issues and was thinking of doing the same. Were you planning on making the result public?

Did you use dioxus? I had claude write up a test web app with it, but when attempting to use a javascript component it built it couldn't get past memory access out of bound errors.

I used leptos. Before I started I made a text file containing the entire leptos manual, and told claude to read it. I don't know if that helped, but claude seems to use it just fine.

Can you release it as open source code?

Sure; I’ll throw it online in a few hours when I’m at my computer.

Code is here: https://github.com/josephg/claude-mail

Live version: https://seph.au/claude-webmail/

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

This is the biggest bottleneck at this point. I'm looking forward to RAM production increasing, and getting to a point where every high-end PC (workstation & gaming) has a dedicated NPU next to the GPU. You'll be able to do this kind of stuff as much as you want, using any local model you want. Run a ralph loop continuously for 72 hours? No problem.

Wasting electricity to "generate tens of thousands of lines of useless code" at will? Why is that in any way a desirable future?

One person's waste is another's value. Do you have any idea how "wasteful" tik tok or any other streaming platform is? I'll grant that AI is driving unprecedented data center development but it's far from the root cause, or even a leading clause, of our climate issues. I always find it strange that this is the first response so many have to AI, when it poses other more imminent existential threats IMO.

It was a reply to what the GP said about running local generation 24/7 for no good reason, just because it's possible (and electricity is too cheap, apparently). There are many more threats, but those are beside the point in this specific context.

The climate change alarms have been sounding for decades and yet vehicles keep getting bigger. Even in formerly "doing it right" countries like Japan. Turns out humans will always choose vanity and status symbols over facts. Oh well

A lot of code is "useless" only in the sense that no one wants to buy it and it will never find its way into an end user product. On the other hand, that same code might have enormous value for education, research, planning, exploration, simulation, testing, and so on. Being able to generate reams of "useless" code is a highly desirable future.

Obviously "useful" doesn't just involve making money. Code that will be used for education and all of these things is clearly not useless.

But let's be honest to ourselves, the sort of useless code the GP meant will never ever be used for any of that. The code will never leave their personal storage. In that sense it's about as valuable for the society at large as the combined exabytes of GenAI smut that people have been filling their drives with by running their 4090s 24/7.

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 vastly more commonplace, even now) use case for running genAI every day for hours.

The bigger use for case for AAA games? Employment for highly talented artists, 3D modellers and sculptors, texture artists, sound and music artists, and even programmers.

At least it gives _something_ back. Until of course we've obsoleted all of them as well.

Most of the AAA games I've paid for sit there in my Steam library and never get played. At least _some_ of the money probably went to those talented people whose work was used for training GenAI and coding models (and yes I say this as someone who has used all of these tools to prototype my own games, and still think human created content is of a much higher quality, just more expensive to produce).

> 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?

Wait until you find out about video games.

I bet RAM production will only increase to meet AI demand and there will be none left for you. Or me. Or anyone. Crucial is already going probably forever and I'm sure more will follow...

Yeah, OpenAI play was to cripple local AI "forever" (until the bubble pops), not to just deny RAM to competitors

> a relic from the days when everyone thought Drupal was the future (long time ago).

Drupal is the future. I never really used it properly, but if you fully buy into Drupal, it can do most everything without programming, and you can write plugins (extensions? whatever they're called...) to do the few things that do need programming.

> 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.

This is the problem! Fickle halfwits mindlessly buying into whatever "next big thing" is currently fashionable. They shoulda just learned Drupal...

I'm not sure if you're serious or not, but while I never liked Drupal (even used to hate it once upon a time), I always liked the pragmatism surrounding it, reaching to the point of saving php code into the mysql database and executing from there.

> reaching to the point of saving php code into the mysql database and executing from there.

Wordpress loves to shove php objects into the database (been a good long while since I used it, don't remember the mechanism, it'd be the equivalent of `pickle` in python, only readable by php).

Not sure if they've improved it since I last dealt with it about 15 years ago, but at the time there was no way to have a full separated staging and production environment, lots of the data stored in the database that way had hardcoded domain names built into it. We needed to have a staging and production kind of set-up, so we ended up having to write a PHP script that would dump the staging database, fix every reference, and push it to production. Fun times.

There's implode() and explode() as well as serialize() and unseralize()

No idea what's used in wordpress, but back in D6 and before, it was common to see it when it would store multiple values for an instance.

There are plenty of SMEs trapped into that future. :)

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

Pardon me, and, yes, I know we're on HN, but I guess you're... rich? I imagine a single run like this probably burns through tens or hundreds of dollars. For a joke, basically.

I guess I understand why some people really like AI :-)

It was below 100$, but only after burning through the 20x max session limit.

The subsidized Codex/Claude subscriptions make it not so bad.

It's something you'd do once for shits and giggles, before realizing it's only funny once.

Agree, and it's also such a shame that none of the AI companies actually focus on that way of using AI.

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 don't want "Fire one prompt and get somewhat working code", I want a UX tailored for long sessions with back and forth, letting me leverage my skills, rather than agents trying to emulate what I already can do myself.

It was said a long time ago about computing in general, but more fitting than ever, "Augmenting the human intellect" is what we should aim for, not replacing the human intellect. IA ("Intelligence amplification") rather than AI.

But I'm guessing the target market for such tools would be much smaller, basically would require you to already understand software development, and know what you want, while all AI companies seem to target non-developers wanting to build software now. It's no-code all over again essentially.

Is it any surprise that the cocaine cartels really want you to buy more cocaine, so they don't focus on its usefulness in pain relief and they refine it and cut it with the cheapest substances that will work rather than medical-grade reagents?

Same thing.

It's surprising that the ones who are producing the cocaine, don't try to find the best use of the cocaine, yes. But then these are VC-fueled businesses, then it all goes out the window, unfortunately. Otherwise they'd actually focus on usefulness, not just "usage" or whatever KPI they go by and share with their investors.

LLMs are drugs because they’re addictive and sap your abilities, is it?

(or generally: “Is the cocaine cartel comparison fair or unfair?”)

LLMs are fair to compare to cocaine because while there certainly could be ethical producers who follow reasonable laws and work to develop good uses, the market is completely dominated by organizations that don't.

And in my experience potheads offer you a toke and if you politely refuse, no problem at all. Coke addicts don't want to take no for an answer and insist that everybody should do it, they get so much more done, decisions are faster and better and what the hell is wrong with you if you don't want some?

So, the users are similar too.

Of course there are tools focusing on this. It takes a little getting used to how prevalent it is. My editor now can anticipate the next three lines of code I intend to write complete with what values I want to feed to the function I was about to invoke. It all shows up in an autocomplete annotation for me. I just type the first two or three characters and press tab to get everything exactly how I was about to type it in--including an accurate comment worded exactly in my voice.

Is that what you mean by IA?

For example, I type "for" and my editor guesses I want to iterate over the list that is the second argument of the function for which I am currently building the body. So it offers to complete the rest of the loop condition for me. Not only did it anticipate that I am writing a for loop. It figures out what I want to iterate over, and perhaps even that I want to enumerate the iteration so I have the index and the value. Imagine if I had written a comment to explain my intent for the function before I started writing the function body. How much better could it augment my intellect?

To be honest, I'm not quite sure what the ideal UX looks like yet. The AI assisted autocomplete is too little, but the idea of saying "Build X for purpose Y" is too high-level. Maintaining Markdown documents that the AI implements, also feels too high-level, but letting the human fully drive the implementation probably again too low-level.

I'm guessing the direction I'd prefer, would be tooling built to accept and be driven by humans, but allowed to be extended/corrected by AI, or something like that, maybe.

Maybe a slight contradiction, and very wish-washy/hand-wavey, but I haven't personally quite figured out what I think would be best yet either, what the right level actually is, so probably the best I could say right now :) Sorry!

The Markdown documents can be at any level. Just keep asking the AI to break each individual step in the plan down into substeps, then ask it to implement after you review. It's great for the opposite flow too - reverse engineering from working legacy code into mid-level and high-level designs, then proposing good refactors.

Yes, I'm talking about a UX that could handle that for the programmer instead, as an example. Zoom out a bit :)

I think this could be a decent interface with one addition, a way to comment on the completion being suggested. You could ask it for a different completion or to extend the completion, do something different, do a specific thing, whatever. An active way to "explain my intent" with the AI (besides leaving comments hinting at what you want) in addition to the passive completion system.

Still magical a few years in?

>Imagine if I had written a comment to explain my intent for the function before I started writing the function body.

This in particular is not dissimilar from opening a chat with a model and giving it a prompt as usual but then adding at the end:

Begin your response below:

  { func

Which editor?

> Imagine if I had written a comment to explain my intent for the function before I started writing the function body.

The loon programming language (a Lisp) has "semantic functions", where the body is just the doc comment.

>Agree, and it's also such a shame that none of the AI companies actually focus on that way of using AI.

This is because, regardless of the current state of things, the endgame which will justify all the upfront investment is autonomous, self-improving, self-maintaining systems.

I think it was Steve Jobs who said computers should be like a bicycle for the mind, I tend to agree

Yeah, Douglas Engelbart was also a huge believer in that, and I think from various stuff I've read from him and the Augmentation Research Center put me on this track of really agreeing with it.

"Bicycle for the mind", as always when it involves Jobs, sounds more fitting for the masses though, so thanks for sharing that :)

Agents are a "self-driving car for the mind". I don't enjoy or dislike driving, but lots of Americans love to drive. In the future they will lament their driving skills' decline.

We as the general population have consistently lost lots of skills from just 200 years back. Most likely we will not miss them (though coding used to be my hobby).

Though if apocalypse happens and all of our built tech goes away, we are in for a serious survival issu.

Though if ~~apocalypse~~ war happens and all of our built tech goes away, we are in for a serious survival issue.

A lot closer than you think, too

>Most likely we will not miss them

given that we've also lost the faculty to look at the past with anything other than contempt most people wouldn't even know what they miss. The little problem with losing the 'general cognition' department, just like broad social or cultural decline is that you lose the ability to even judge what you're losing, because the thing you just lost was doing the judging

I love this Jobs quote for two reasons:

(1) It captures the ideal so well

(2) The bitter irony of how thoroughly pre-OS X Macintosh computers failed to live up to it

I feel like there's a similar dichotomy in LLM tools now

"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 want it to change anything I just want it to tell me of any problems. A linter basically. I imagine LLMs would be a good foundation for this.

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 <<'EOF' >> foo...EOF` pattern to create a file, or sed to read a couple lines), so it's sometimes hard to see what is it even trying to do.

"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.

Lot's of `echo "doing a thing" ; some --other command"` which then prompt the user to permit echo commands like this...

I’m glad I’m not the only one who’s noticed these seemingly arbitrary calls to write files using the cat command instead of the native file edit capabilities of the agent.

> Agree, and it's also such a shame that none of the AI companies actually focus on that way of using AI.

their valuations are replaced on getting rid of you entirely, along with everyone else

the "humans can use it to increase their productivity" is an interim step

I am learning rust myself and one of the things I definetly didn't want to do was let Claude write all the code. But I needed guidance.

I decided to create a Claude skill called "teach". When I enable it, Claude never writes any code. It just gives me hints - progressively more detailed if I am stuck. Then it reviews what I write.

I am finding it very satisfying to work this way - Rust in particular is a language where there's little space to "wing it". Most language features are interlaced with each other and having an LLM supporting me helps a lot. "Let's not declare a type for this right now, we would have to deal with several lifetime issues, let's add a note to the plan and revisit this later".

FYI: Claude has output styles, one of them is called `learning`. Instead of writing the code itself, it will add `TODO(human)` and comments to explain how to. Also adds `Insights` explaining concepts to you in its output.

This link also has a comparison to Skills further down.

https://code.claude.com/docs/en/output-styles#built-in-outpu...

I had a bash spaghetti code script that I wrote a few years ago to handle TLS certificates(generate CSRs, bundle up trust chains, match keys to certs, etc). It was fragile, slow, extremely dependent on specific versions of OpenSSL, etc.

I used Claude to rewrite it in golang and extend its features. Now I have tests, automatic AIA chain walking, support for all the DER and JKS formats, and it’s fast. My bash script could spend a few minutes churning through a folder with certs and keys, my golang version does a few thousand in a second.

So I basically built a limited version of OpenSSL with better ergonomics and a lot of magic under the hood because you don’t have to specify input formats at all. I wasn’t constrained by things like backwards compatibility and interface stability, which let me make something much nicer to use.

I even was able to build a wasm version so it can run in the browser. All this from someone that is not a great coder. Don’t worry, I’m explicitly not rolling my own crypto.

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 the meantime, we can just continue doing work with these new tools.

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"?

How about “engineering”?

I havent quite dealt with "teams of agents" yet outside of Claude Code itself spawning subagents, but I have some ideas as to how to achieve it in a meaningful way without giving a developer 10 claude code licenses, I think the real approach that makes more sense to me is to still have humans in the loop, but have their respective agents sync together and divide work towards one goal, but being able to determine which tasks are left to be worked one and tested. I do think for the foreseeable future you will need human validation for AI.

I thought the term was "agentic engineering"

I like "spec driven development" but I honestly don't care what you call it, just let me build things and leave me alone. :)

SDD is more like a subset. There are different ways to manage context in agentic engineering

I guess, I just know I force my agent to use a ticketing system like Beads (I made my own).

> SDD

Don’t do that! On a two-day-old term?!

No wonder we’re called gatekeepers.

Ok jeez, calm down. I am not shouldering all of the AI discourse lol.

^_^

Yeah that's the top contender at the moment. I think it's pretty good.

https://youtu.be/JV-wY5pxXLo?si=ga-9Gg8IZfU6g8Tg

It's vibe engineering

This does not spark joy.

I'm not sure there's going to be a term, because there's no difference from normal, good quality engineering. You iterate on design, validate results, prioritise execution. It's just that you hand over the writing code part. It's as boring as it gets.

> how some of us

Operative word being “some”. The issue is that too many aren’t doing it that way.

> You dont just go “build thing”

Tell that to the overwhelming majority of posters discussing vibe coding, including on HN.

Sure, but they're going to be stuck writing software for yesterday's problems. As our tools become more powerful, we're going to unlock new problems and expectations that would be impossible or impractical to solve with yesterday's tooling.

>Sure, but they're going to be stuck writing software for yesterday's problems

As long as they get paid for it (or have fun, if it's a personal project), they couldn't care less about that. Tomorrow's problems are overrated.

I suppose to some extent those people have always existed. The ones who would choose the most expedient solution.

The difference now is they can get much further along.

> despite what the haters say

Thinking people who disagree with you hate you or hate the thing you like is a recipe for disaster. It's much better to not love or hate things like this, and instead just observe and come to useful, outcome-based conclusions.

LLMs really do attract haters in the classic sense though. You'll find them in almost every thread on here.

They also attract grifters, frauds, conmen, snake oil peddlers, and every stripe of bullshit artist. I'm someone you probably would view as a hater, but I truly don't hate LLMs. I hate the lies. Projects like this are interesting, I wish there was a lot more of this and a lot less of the "trust me bro" stuff.

Look at any HN thread that has a project that uses AI in any way, shape or form. People quickly remark that it is slop, without even reviewing the code. If that's not blind hatred of AI, I don't know what is.

There's a huge distinction between Vibe Coding, and actual software engineers using AI tooling effectively. I vibe code for fun sometimes too, nothing wrong with it, helps me figure out how the model behaves in some instances, and to push the limits of what I understand.

Vibe Coding is like porn for programmers. It probably isn't good for you, and you'd probably be better off actually doing the thing yourself, but it feels good and satisfies our desires for instant gratification

Well, take for example, I have ideas I've had for years but no time for because by now the requirements are insane. I want to build a backend that could survive nuclear fallout type stuff. I braindump to Claude, watch it churn out my vision for the last 12 years, its insane.

There's other things too though: my ADD and my impostor syndrome don't matter to Claude, Claude just takes it all in, so as I keep brain dumping, it keeps chugging along. I don't have to worry a bout "can I really do this?" it just does it and I can focus on "what can I do to make it better" essentially.

For me it's beyond "porn coding" its basically fulfilling my vision that's been locked away for years but I've had no time to sit down and do it fully. I can tell Claude to do something, my kid comes up and asks me to go draw with them and I can actually just walk away and look at the output and refine.

I never said it doesn't have use cases (much like porn a lot of the arguments against are just fear mongering) just that it isn't as good as the real thing. I myself like yapping to an LLM about ideas to see how feasible they actually are before taking a crack at it

Bitching about vibe coding is like watching porn. It makes you feel a bit better in the moment, but it doesn't do anything to address whatever problems in your life have lead you seek comfort in bitching about a thing other people are doing.

Yes yes, ironic comment, since I'm bitching about you bitching. Really though, not everybody is looking to spend hours of their life fine tuning their personal coding abilities. Coding is a means to an end, not the end itself, it's a way to solve problems and if vibe coding can get you the solution the fastest then it's foolish to not use it. Doing the job slower with more effort, because in the future you think that effort is somehow going to pay off by boosting your skills, when in the future LLMs will be even more capable vibe coders anyway is very misguided. If coding is the true objective and you aren't doing it to get something else done, then more power to you, but most people code to solve problems, not for the sake of coding.

Comparing bitching about vibe coding to porn is like watching porn. You come away feeling better, but you didn't engage meaningfully with anyone else.

Who's next?

> People quickly remark that it is slop, without even reviewing the code.

I absolutely hate how "slop" has lost its meaning.

"AI slop" was supposed to mean poor-quality content that's obviously AI-generated. But the anti-AI crowd has co-opted it to mean any AI-generated content, regardless of quality. EDIT: Or even the quantity of AI. Expedition 33 had a ton of critical acclaim and ended up winning tons of awards, yet once it was discovered that AI was used to generate some placeholder art, of which NONE of it was actually used in the final product, some people started labeling the game as AI slop. It's utterly ridiculous.

So now, we can't have conversations about AI slop without starting off with making sure everyone is on the same page on what the term even means.

EDIT: "Vibe coding" is suffering a similar fate. If I use AI to write some code, and I examine the code to make sure it doesn't have any obvious bugs or security issues, is that still vibe coding?

We keep seeing this pattern over and over as well. Despite LLM companies' almost tangible desperation to show that they can replace software engineers, the real value comes from domain experts using the tools to enhance what they're already good at.

I'd guess this is a bet on which market is more lucrative:

* domain experts paying for tooling that will enhance their productivity

* capital/management class hoping to significantly replace domain experts

Software devs have been a famously tough market to sell tools to for a long time, so the better bet is B. Plus, the story on B is fantastic for fundraising; if there's a 10% chance that it checks out, you want some part of that as your capital portfolio.

I don't think they actually care if it ever materializes. They just have to sell execs on it. As long as they can the exec will sell it to their higher ups, mostly by just flat out lying about it.

I see it all the time at the Director and VP level. Once big money is on the line, there are no failures, just "opportunities for strategic realignment"

I did this exact same thing for porting a compiler from one language to another with Codex. I run tests at every step, and verified that bytecode output was byte-for-byte identical. I was very impressed at the results, and this is coming from someone who's always pointing out issues with AI programming.

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.

Solving the big RAM shortage one prompt at a time.

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.

Before Node/libuv holding open connections was really expensive resource-wise, dropping that cost to <30KB per connection was massive.

The node binary is huge due to inclusion of i18n libraries to support the native APIs, and should have little impact on memory consumption. There is a way to opt out.

I used to have a bunch of bespoke node express server utilities that I liked to keep running in the background to have access to throughout the day but 40-50mb per process adds up quickly.

I’ve been throwing codex at them and now they’ve all been rewritten in Go - cut down to about 10mb per process.

I haven’t done a ton of porting. And when I did, it was more like a reimplementation.

> We’ve verified that every AST produced by the Rust parser is identical to the C++ one, and all bytecode generated by the Rust compiler is identical to the C++ compiler’s output.

Is this a conventional goal? It seems like quite an achievement.

My company helps companies do migrations using LLM agents and rigid validations, and it is not a surprising goal. Of course most projects are not as clean as a compiler is in terms of their inputs and outputs, but our pitch to customers is that we aim to do bug-for-bug compatible migrations.

Porting a project from PHP7 to PHP8, you'd want the exact same SQL statements to be sent to the server for your test suite, or at least be able to explain the differences. Porting AngularJS to Vue, you'd want the same backend requests, etc..

It’s a very good way of getting LLMs to work autonomously for a long time; give it a spec and a complete test suite, shut the door; and ask it to call you when all the tests pass.

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 added it to the agent. A simple markdown skill does not work because it 'forgets'. A 'github' based PR flow felt too externally dependent. This workflow is enforced by a 'patcher' skill, and once that's active, tools do not work unless they follow the enforced flow.

I think a lot of people are going to feel comfortable using agents this way rather than going full blast. I do all my development this way.

This is broadly how I worked when I was still using chat instead of cli agents for LLM support. The downside, I feel, is that unless this is a codebase / language / architecture I do not know, it feels faster to just code by hand with the AI as a reviewer rather than a writer.

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.

I quit x so cant read beyond toplevel links. I subscribed to your tool on github, would appreciate blog-posts-in-release notes to keep up with future developments. Will try the tool. Rare to find something new among ai hype, thank you.

Fair enough. I'll find a way to publish some of this. I try to cover most of the information in the docs/ folder, and keep it up to date. Blog posts in release notes is a good idea!

> This was human-directed, not autonomous code generation.

All my vibe coded projects are human directed, unless explicitly stated otherwise

I am having immense success with the latest models developing a personal project that I open sourced and then got burned off by.I can't write anymore by hands but I do enjoy writing prompts with my voice.I have been shipping the best code the project has ever seen.The revolution is real.

Coding assistants are great at pattern matching and pattern following. This is why it’s a good idea to point them at any examples or demos that come with the libraries you want to use, too.

If every AST is isomorphic, why bother? Don't you miss getting some of the advantages of Rust?

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

> Coding assistants are also really great at porting from one language to the other

No, they are quite terrible at doing that.

They may (I guess?) produce code that compiles, but they will, almost certainly not produce the appropriate combination of idioms and custom abstractions that may the code "at home" in the target language.

PS - Please fix your blockquote... HN ignores single linebreaks, so you have to either using pairs of them, or possibly go with italicization of the quoted text.

How does he solve the Fruit of the Poison Tree problem? For all he know, his LLMs included a bunch copyrighted or patented code throughout the codebase. How is he going to convince serious people that this port is not just a transformation of an _asset_ into a _liability_?

And you might say that this is a hypothetical problem, one that is not practically occurring. Well, we had a similar problem like this in the recent past, that LLMs are close to _making actual_. When it comes to software patents, they were considered a _hypothetical_ problem (i.e. nobody is going to bother suing you unless you were so big that violating a patent was a near certainty). We were instructed (at pretty much all jobs), to never read patents, so that we cannot incriminate ourselves in the discovery process.

That is going to change soon (within a year). I have friend, whom I won't name, who is working on a project, using LLMs, to discover whether software (open source and proprietary) is likely to be violating a software patent from a patent database. And it is designed to be used, not by programmers, but by law firms, patent attorneys, etc. Even though it is not marketed this way, it is essentially a target acquisition system for use by patent trolls. It is hard for me to tell if this means that we will have to keep ignoring patents for that plausible deniability, or if this means that we will have to become hyper informed about all patents. I suppose, we can just subscribe to the patent-agent, and hope that it guides the other coding agents into avoiding the insertion of potentially infringing code.

(I also have a friend who built a system in 2020 that could translate between C++ and Python, and guarantee equivalent results, and code that looks human-written. This was a very impressive achievement, especially because of how it guarantees the equivalence (it did not require machine-learning nor GPUs, just CPUs and some classic algorithms from the 80s). The friend informs me that they are very disheartened to see that now any toddler with a credit card can mindlessly do something similar, invalidating around a decade of unpublished research. They tell me that it will remain unpublished, and if they could go back in time, they would spend that decade extracting as much surplus from society as possible, by hook or by crook (apparently they had the means and the opportunity, but lacked the motive); we should all learn from my friend's mistake. The only people who succeed are, sadly, perversely, those who brazenly and shamelessly steal -- and make no mistake, the AI companies are built on theft. When millionaires do it, they become billionaires -- when Aaron Swartz does it, he is sentenced to federal prison. I'm not quite a pessimist yet, but it really is saddening to watch my friend go from a passionate optimist to a cold nihilist.).

One or both of you have the story very wrong.

If there was value (the guarantees) to this tech he buried a bunch of time in, he should be wrapping a natural language prompt around it and selling it.

Not even the top providers are giving any sort of tangible safety or reliability guarantees in the enterprise…

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 stance is.

At least contributing will be a lot nicer from my end, because my PR's to Ladybird have been bad due to having no CPP experience. I had no idea what I was doing.

> I guess more anti-hype, where Rust was the hype

Yeah that is the thing I struggle with. I am really happy for people falling in love with Rust. It is a amazing language when used for the right use case.

The problem is that had my Rust adventures a few years ago and I am over the hype cycle and able to see both the advantages and disadvantages. Plus being generally older and hopefully wiser I don't tie my identity towards any specific programming language that much.

So sometimes when some Junior dev discovers Rust and they get really obnoxious with their evangelicalism it can be very off putting. Really not sure how to solve it. It is good when people get excited about a language. It just can be very annoying for everyone else sometimes.

> So sometimes when some Junior dev discovers Rust and they get really obnoxious with their evangelicalism it can be very off putting. Really not sure how to solve it. It is good when people get excited about a language. It just can be very annoying for everyone else sometimes.

This rings very true, and I've actually disadvantaged myself somewhat here. I was involved in projects that made very dubious decisions to rewrite large systems in Rust. This caused me to actively stay away from the language, and stick to C++, investing lots of time in overcoming its shortcomings.

Now years later, I started with Rust in a new project. And I must say, I like the language, I really like the tools, and I like the ecosystem. On some dimension I wish I would have done this sooner (but on the other hand, I think I have a better justification of "why Rust" now).

I find the attitude of the Ladybird devs refreshing though, and it kinda aligns with my opinions about Rust.

I never fell in love with Rust or got particularly excited about adopting it. But, I just don't see a serious alternative (maybe Swift is fine for some cases but not in my field).

I believe Google's Rust journey was even more closely aligned with Ladybird: "we want memory safety, but with low impedance mismatch from C++". After like 5 years of trying to figure something like that out they seemed to go "OK actually fuck that we just have to use Rust and deal with the challenges it brings for a C++ shop".

The whole obnoxious dogmatic evangelicalism thing is definitely a wider human phenomenon outside software and junior devs picking up new languages.

Definitely isn’t one of those things that can be solved, but it’s helpful to be aware of and process on that basis. I think some personalities are likely disproportionately vulnerable to this behaviour, but I think it largely has a positive core of enthusiasm. It’s probably more a matter of those individuals growing in self awareness.

Perhaps we saw a big wave of that with rust because it meant a lot of things to a lot of different people, some more equip to express their enthusiasm with some self control than others.

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 the hype roller coaster.

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.

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 result most Rust projects have rather sprawling dependency trees, often with duplicated functionality (multiple Base64, rand, sha256, etc crates). I personally have a problem with this (auditability, accountability, security, complexity etc). Others don't.

3. Despite being nominally runtime agnostic, Rust async basically is tokio and it's almost impossible to use another runtime once you factor in third party deps. In many ways Rust is the language that tokio ate. In fact even if you opt out of async entirely, you often end up with tokio as a dependency simply because the community just seems to expect it.

4. Despite advertising itself as a "systems" language, some basic systems programming facilities I expect from my C++ background are still fundamentally not there. In particular, per-container/struct pluggable allocators still isn't a thing and the feature to add it (allocator-api) has sat unmerged in nightly for almost ten years at this point and it doesn't look good for it landing any time soon.

5. If you're working in the embedded space, there's still plenty of devices that will not have a workable Rust toolchain option yet.

I still choose it for new projects instead of its competitors C++ or Zig. But I think it's important to recognize there are compromises like any other tool.

As much as people might insist otherwise, there will in fact come a day when there are "multiple Rusts" by which I mean multiple styles and ways of doing things -- just like C++. For myself, for example... if it were my repository and my team and my hiring, and I was starting from scratch... I'd be extremely careful about third party crate adoption and have an extremely minimalistic approach there. And I don't use tokio. Though my paying jobs do.

First 2 are very legit, as a rust dev myself. I wish Rust had a larger stdlib and every argument against it leaves me pretty unconvinced/ feeling like the arguments could just as easily leave us to believe that "HashMap" should not be included (some people believe this), or even "time" should not be, etc.

The compile times are easily the worst part though. They couple poorly with (2).

I feel fine personally without (3), and (4)/(5) don't come up for me.

> For myself, for example... if it were my repository and my team and my hiring, and I was starting from scratch... I'd be extremely careful about third party crate adoption and have an extremely minimalistic approach there.

Same. I basically stick to a minimal `cargo-vet` and avoid new crates. I review new ones. I've chosen to take on a new crate when it's something like "the author literally wrote the spec for this format", but otherwise I'm reluctant.

> 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.

I don't think they mean multiple versions of the same crate (although can certainly happen too), but rather multiple different crates that cover the same functionality.

this

tho duplicated crates with different major versions through transitive deps is also i believe possible

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!

It’s a pretty good language and ecosystem. Downside was always the community which every ten seconds someone will start asking to tax everyone to fund Rust Software Foundation or constantly argue that you have to donate a percentage of income to it. Now with LLM I don’t have to talk to community. Huge improvement.

Problem with community is it has experts and groupies mixed in. Ideally experts can talk somewhere and groupies can go somewhere else and talk about funding RSF etc. but now is unnecessary. Expert is available on demand via chatbot.

> every ten seconds someone will start asking to tax everyone to fund Rust Software Foundation or constantly argue that you have to donate a percentage of income to it

I have literally never heard this, in ~decade of working with Rust. I think you may be taking some random mailing list discussions a little too seriously

I've been writing rust for over a decade and I've been quite active in the community at times. I've barely even heard of the rust foundation, let alone seen suggestions to donate.

> So sometimes when some Junior dev discovers Rust and they get really obnoxious with their evangelicalism it can be very off putting.

And experience doesn't equal correct decision making. People just get traumatized in different ways.

> Ladybird praises CPP/Swift currently

Not anymore.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47067678

I guess I missed this, thanks!

They are moving fast.

Next month it will be yet-another-language.

Eventually they come full circle and settle for either C or C++.

They've been stuck with swift adoption for a long time, abandoning that was the reasonable decision. That only leaves Rust as the second language to C++

I'd argue Ladybird itself is a "hype" project.

Anything trying to break the browser monopolies in a meaningful way deserves the hype, IMO.

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!

To me, a project's "hype-ness" is the ratio of how much attention it gets over how useful it actually is to users.

As a browser, Ladybird usefulness is currently quite limited for obvious reasons. This is not meant to dismiss its achievements, nor to overlook the fact that building a truly useful browser for everyday users is something few open source teams can accomplish without the backing of a billion dollar company. Still, in its present state, its practical utility remains limited.

> As a browser, Ladybird usefulness is currently quite limited for obvious reasons

By this definition all basic research is hype.

No, not necessarily. It's the ratio and for most basic research the numerator of the fraction is also approaching zero.

Yes, necessarily. Basic research is currently useless in the same way building something that hasn’t been built is currently useless.

Good verdict. I agree.

Ladybird will have to deliver eventually - on this part I think many people agree with.

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

A release (?)

Somehow people manage to run it without this magical release

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

Its possible to dislike Rust but pragmatically use it. Personally, I do not like Rust, but it is the best available choice for some work and personal stuff.

I think this is a good, realistic point of view.

Personally I think most programming languages have really ... huge problems. And the languages that are more fun to use, ruby or python, are slow. I wonder if we could have a great, effective, elegant language that is also slow. All that try end up with e. g. with a C++ like language.

Honestly I find writing Rust more fun than writing Python. Python just doesn't scale, any non-trivial quantity of it has a habit of turning into spaghetti however hard I try to be disciplined.

Rust, although annoying at a micro scale, does at least enforce some structure on your code, although like Kling I miss OO.

AI has made Rust approachable to a new audience of programmers who didn't want to dedicate their life to learning the ins and outs of the language. Especially for C++ developers who already learned the ins and outs of a hyper complex programming language and don't want to go through that a second time.

Before AI, writing Rust was frustrating experience that involved spending 90% of your time reading documentation and grumbling that "I could do this in 5 minutes in C++"

Now I can write Rust in a way that makes sense to my C++ addled brain and let the AI do the important job of turning it into an idiomatic Rust program that compiles.

Definetly, thats how I have felt about and used C++ for most of my career. ( well except I dont select C++ for personal projects).

I wouldnt go as far as to say, I dont like Rust, but it doesnt come natural to me like many other languages do after several decades of experience.

So what don't you like about it?

Its for the time being is stuck with LLVM, so I can't currently LTO with GCC objects. Its got a lot higher complexity than I perfer in a language. A lot of features I find important seem perma-unstable. Pin is unnessesarily confusing. No easy way to define multiple compilation units for use with linker object selection and attribute constructor. The easy path is downloading binary toolchains with rustup and not using your disto package manager. You can't use unstable features without the bootstrap env var on distro rust toolchains. Cargo leads to dependency bloat. The std/core crates are prebuilt binaries and bloat binary sizes. Bindgen doesn't translate static inline code. The language has a ton of stuff it exposes just to std and not user code. Unsafe code is unergonomic. No easy way to model a cleanup function that needs more args. No support for returns_twice. No ability to use newer stuff like preserve_none. Can't go-to-definition from a bindgen binding to original header file. Macros pollute global namespace. Can't account for platforms where size_t and uintptr_t are different. Traits can only be relied on if marked unsafe. Can't implement something like defer since it holds a borrow. no_std code still can pull in core::fmt. Can't enforce dependencies are also no_std. Panics are considered safe. No way to add non-function fields to dyn vtables. No way to declare code separately from definition. No way to have duplicate type definitions that merge, making interop between different bindgen generated modules annoying.

I am somewhat concerned about the volatility. All three languages have their merits and each has a stable foundation that has been developed and established over many years. The fact that the programming language has been “changed” within a short period of time, or rather that the direction has been altered, does not inspire confidence in the overall continuity of Ladybird's design decisions.

Ladybird as a project is not that old, and it's still in pre-alpha, if they are going to make important changes then it's better now than later.

> I am somewhat concerned about the volatility.

Not just volatility but also flip-flopping. Rust was explicitly a contender when they decided to go with Swift 18 months ago, and they've already done a 180 on it despite the language being more or less the same as it was.

they tried swift, it didn't work, and they figured rust was the best remaining option. that's not "flip-flopping" (by which I assume you mean random indecisiveness that leads to them changing their mind for no reason)

Yup, this was not flip-flopping, it was willingness to be open to options, even if it means going back on a decision branch made earlier in the process.

For the Ladybird project, now is the best time to be making a big decision like this, and it's commendable that the project lead was honest to recognize when an earlier attempt was not working, to be able to re-think and come to a better decision. I'm no fan of Rust, but for this project I think most of us would agree it's a better language than Swift for their purpose.

They made a very pragmatic and sensible decision after reviewing Swift that it wouldn't be suitable for their purposes, so they shifted to the next best alternative. I think they reasoned it very well and made a great decision.

I guess they bet on Swift being more than Apple's blessed way of writing UI software.

It's not that they are loving Rust, but they realized going all-in on Swift means becoming sharecroppers on massa Tim Apple's plantation.

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.

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.

> I think I need a lot more info about this migration

Doesn't sound like it's some Fish-style, full migration to Rust of everything. Seems like they are just moving a couple parts over for evaluation, and then, going forward, making it an official project language that folks are free to use. They note that basically every browser already does that, so this isn't a huge shakeup.

This makes sense because GUI wise Rust isn't really here yet (but it's close).

TFA mentions "the contributor's" stance on Swift.

But not the stance on Rust, which is something I'm wondering. I understand there's a core team assigned, but are the ~200 contributors okay with this migration?

Why would 200 contributors have to be okay with this migration? The project has a leader, the leader makes decisions.

because let's say 150 contributors might not be okay with the decision and leave. hard to lead from the front if there is nobody behind to be lead.

To be fair, any of them who didn't leave in the last few controversies probably won't leave over this.

"I can excuse foaming over pronouns and master branch, but I draw a line at using rust" Would not be surprised by that opinion.

They abandoned Swift recently.

The public announcement was less then a week ago. Meanwhile in TFA:

> ... the entire port took about two weeks.

So he was ~halfway in when he made the Swift announcement.

Doesn’t sound like a bad thing to evaluate the most obvious alternative to build confidence before officially pulling the plug.

The most obvious alternative would be Zig. I don't see any Swift adoption outside the Apple ecosystem.

The key requirement is memory safety, which would rule out Zig.

Last time I checked, Zig was breaking it's stdlib, so it's not an alternative imo

Swift adoption had been dead long before the actual announcement. It's likely Rust was being considered long before this two week experiment with LLMs.

it's very odd that someone with no experience would take a big project like this and just jump to another language because he trusts the AI generated code of current models

if it works it works i guess, but it seems mad to me on the surface

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 is why i said "on the surface"

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.

It's hard to articulate, but as someone who knows first hand, I just want to say that manic productivity is not the same as solid engineering.

Did you read the OP? No trust, only thorough verification.

I did, and the point stands because reading someone else's code is not the same as writing it, esp. when you're not able to do so to the same standard

Non sequitur. Again, no trust was involved, only verification through extreme testing.

Also, as others have pointed out, "someone with no experience" simply isn't true.

the trust element to me is jumping into a port, not specific code although code you didn't write in a language you're not an expert with, will ALWAYS introduce an added risk of falling into pitfalls you can only avoid with experience, the more the merrier

you're banking in the LLMs quite strongly when you do that, which may just work but i would be very worried about myself if i were in his boots

> code you didn't write

He did write it.

> you're banking in the LLMs quite strongly when you do that, which may just work but i would be very worried about myself if i were in his boots

I too would worry if it were you doing it.

> He did write it.

he did not, the LLM did it

> I too would worry if it were you doing it.

i would not worry about anything you do, because it's obvious you would never get to that point

"It" was the C++ code ... you don't even understand what you yourself wrote.

> i would not worry about anything you do, because it's obvious you would never get to that point

Childish whatabouting and projection. I will never respond to you again.

> especially since Ladybird devs have been very vocal about being "anti-rust" (I guess more anti-hype, where Rust was the hype).

I mean, they seem mostly to be against anything that isn't C++'s peculiar brand of Object Oriented Programming?

(also against women and immigrants, but that's a different story)

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 initial change to Swift was surely motivated by potential industry support gain (i believe it was a dubious choice from purely engineering standpoint).

It's awe-inspiring to see how a person can carve a job for himself, leverage hobbyists'/hackers' interest and contributions, attract industry attention and sponsors all while doing the thing he likes (assuming, browsers are his thing) in a controlling position.

Can't fully rationalize the feeling, but all of this makes me slightly wary. Doesn't make it less cool to observe from a side, though.

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."

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.

Yeah, main issue with Swift is that the c++ interop (which was absolutely bleeding-edge) still isn't to the point of being able to pull in parts of the Ladybird codebase.

If I recall correctly, part of this was around classes they had that replaced parts of the STL, whereas the Swift C++ interop makes assumptions about things with certain standard names.

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."

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...

Yeah, this is glorified yak-shaving if we're being real. I'm not getting my hopes up for a true new browser

>assuming, browsers are his thing

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

> but all of this makes me slightly wary.

Wary of what?

I'd say it's the idea/fact/feeling that, in 2026, agency matters more than skill/wisdom/intelligence.

Long read on the topic (quite funny, covers Cluely): https://harpers.org/archive/2026/03/childs-play-sam-kriss-ai...

Probably, Roy was born agentic as a part of a package which included an disregard for intellectual growth.

This doesn't mean that being agentic cannot be cultivated by regular people.

In 2026, yes, agency matters more than skill/wisdom/intelligence to get VC funds. But what's the point of agency alone if you are leading such a life?

What gives me hope is that in 2026, skillful people can delegate a lot of their work to LLMs, which gives them time to learn the "agentic" part which is basically marketing and talking with people.

(just thinking out loud)

This is less about languages and more about so-called AI. One thing’s for sure: it’s becoming harder and harder to deny that agentic coding is revolutionizing software development.

We’re at the point where a solid test suite and a high-quality agent can achieve impressive results in the hands of a competent coder. Yes, it will still screw up, needs careful human review and steering, etc, but there is a tangible productivity improvement. I don’t think it makes sense putting numbers on it, but for many tasks, it looks like there’s a tangible benefit.

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

> We know the result isn’t idiomatic Rust, and there’s a lot that can be simplified once we’re comfortable retiring the C++ pipeline. That cleanup will come in time.

Correct me if I’m wrong since I don’t know these two languages, but like some other languages, doing things the idiomatic way could be dramatically different. Is “cleanup” doing a lot of heavy lifting here? Could that also mean another complete rewrite from scratch?

A startup switching languages after years of development is usually a big red flag. “We are rewriting it in X” posts always preceded “We are shutting down”. I wish them luck though!

A mitigating factor in this case is the C++ and Rust are both multi-paradigm languages. You can quite reasonably represent most C++ patterns in Rust, even if it might not be quite how you'd write Rust in the first place.

I disagree. You can't even create simple C++ inheritance examples because you don't have data inheritance. So basically classical OOP is out of the window.

That's the biggest difference to C++ and most mainstream languages, you simply can't do OOP (which in my books is a good thing) and it forces you more towards traits and composition.

In addition, C++ and Rust are very, very similar languages. Almost everything in C++ translates easily, including low level stuff and template shenanigans. There's only a few "oh shit there's no analog" things, like template specialization or virtual inheritance.

Out of all the languages rust takes inspiration from, id rank C++ at the top of the list.

Strong disagree. Rust copied C++ syntax to avoid looking weird to C++ programmers, but the similarity is skin deep. C can be tamed, because it's mostly a subset of Rust, but C++ idioms are a death from papercuts.

OOP, weakly-typed templates, and mutable aliasing create impedance mismatch in almost every C++ API.

Rust doesn't have data inheritance, and what looks like interface inheritance is merely extra requirements in a flat list of traits, so subclassing won't behave like C++ APIs expect. When you translate a class hierarchy to Rust, it needs lots of crutches which make it weird, boilerplatey, and tedious to use. There's no good recipe for OOP hierarchy in Rust, because the idioms are so different. The mismatch feels like writing an ORM.

For some C++ APIs mutability and circular references can be a pain too. Rust works well with DAG data structures and clear mostly-immutable data flow. Objects with some "parent" pointer are common in C++, but Rust sees them as potentially dangling, with shared mutable state, and requires much heavier control of them. It can be done, but it's ugly. Idiomatic Rust designs go to great lengths to avoid it unless necessary, but C++ APIs can have the extra pointers "for convenience".

There's a reason why Rust doesn't have typical GUI libraries - an arbitrary web of references between widgets and event handlers make it ugly in Rust, and that's on top of a view class inheritance.

C++ templates sit very uncomfortably between Rust's macros (duck typed) and Rust's generics (strictly typed at point of declaration).

C++ templates almost always are a mix of types they're attached to and some duck-typing in their expansion.

Rust's generics do not allow any duck typing at all. This makes translation of even a tiny bit clever C++ templates a chore. There's no specialization. No way to deal with SFINAE and such.

Rust macros have flexibility for all the syntax shenanigans (and even similarly bad errors at instantiation time), but macros can't see any types. Idiomatic Rust has very deliberate division between traits (usually much simpler and smaller in scope), macros and proc macros/derives. Splitting C++ templates like that can be a major redesign.

Rust's OOP model fits perfectly into COM, WinRT, which is also OOP from CS point of view, and known for decades.

See Component Software: Beyond Object-Oriented Programming, first edition 2002.

Also the way Microsoft is implementing their windows-rs crate, and WDK for Rust.

As someone who's worked in both C++ and Rust, they're deeply similar languages. There are far more exotic languages out there. APL. Erlang. Forth.

In the grander scheme of things, Java and C# are literally the same language, Rust and C++ are twins, C is their dad, Forth is the owl staring through the dining room window, and Erlang is an alien spaceship passing over the house.

I've been writing Rust since 0.x versions.

> C is their dad

You can write "C with classes" in the "C/C++/Rust" language, and have users of all three tell you you're doing it wrong. The commonalities between them are mostly necessities of systems programming, FFI, and LLVM-style optimizations, but they all try to get there in different ways.

> There are far more exotic languages out there. APL. Erlang. Forth

Early Rust started as an Erlang clone, with task supervision trees and all (panics, lock poisoning, and the defunct UnwindSafe trait are vestigial features from that experiment).

Rust has more in common with Ocaml than C or C++. It's not a C family language, it just took C-like syntax to avoid the stigma of being "exotic" like the languages that inspired it.

Rust did copy move semantics from C++, but even that ended up being different enough to be incompatible with basic C++ design patterns. Rust chose to have only trivially movable types and guarantee absence of move constructors, so it can't even safely pass a C++ std::string.

> It's not a C family language, it just took C-like syntax to avoid the stigma of being "exotic" like the languages that inspired it.

I agree that Rust has very conventional C-like syntax, but I'd go further and say it has fairly conventional C-like semantics too, at least in its current iteration. I think you could safely duck type Rust itself as a C-like. :)

Strong agree that Rust has drawn great inspiration from the ML family by way of OCaml. Rust is a C-like with ML characteristics, which are its greatest quality, imho. On the other hand, I don't think there's much trace of Erlang left in Rust -- there's probably more Erlang in Go than Rust, and Go is squarely a C-like.

I think it's fair to say that Rust started out more exotic than it is now, but perhaps all that safe, C-like syntax has led to convergent evolution towards other C-likes?

> Rust did copy move semantics from C++, but even that ended up being different enough to be incompatible with basic C++ design patterns. Rust chose to have only trivially movable types and guarantee absence of move constructors, so it can't even safely pass a C++ std::string.

Right, but compare all of that to Erlang's actor-based message passing, where mandatory immutability averts the need to move or lock anything at all, and I think it's clear why one would group Rust with C++, and not Erlang.

This is the famous trap that Joel on Software talked about in a blog post long time ago.

If you do a rewrite you essentially put everything else on halt while rewriting.

If you keep doing feature dev on the old while another "tiger team" is doing the rewrite port then these two teams are essentially in a race against each other and the port will likely never catch up. (Depending on relative velocities)

Maybe they think that they can to this LLM assisted tools in a big bang approach quickly and then continue from there without spending too much time on it.

I’ve been part of at least 2 successful rewrites. I think that Joel’s post is too often taken as gospel. Sometimes a rewrite is the best way forward.

Moving Ladybird from C++ to a safer more modern language is a real differentiator vs other browsers, and will probably pay dividends. Doing it now is better than doing it once ladybird is fully established.

One last point about rewrites: you can look at any industry disruptor as essentially a team that did a from-scratch rewrite of their competitors and won because the rewrite was better.

    > I’ve been part of at least 2 successful rewrites. I think that Joel’s post is too often taken as gospel. Sometimes a rewrite is the best way forward.

I can recall recently, listening to an Oxide and Friends podcast where they spent 30 minutes dumping all over "Agile Dev", only to have a very senior, hands-on guy join from AWS and absolutely deliver the smack down. (Personally, I have no positive experiences with Agile Dev, but this guy really stunned the room into silence.) The best part: The Oxide crew immediately recognized the positive experence and backed off the give this guy the space he needed to tell and interesting story. (Hats off the Ox crew for doing that... even if I, personally, have zero love for Agile Dev.)

Firefox, Opera and first Edge were rewrites.

Where are they now?

That's due to google.

With a browser written in C++, and making those three rewrites a moot point.

I still don’t buy this “safer more modern” mentality. Modern C++ pretty much solves the safety issues. People need to learn how to use tools properly.

If you ask me, Go is a better Rust. Rust is an ugly version of C++ with longer compile times and a band of zealous missionaries.

I mean the keywords mut and fn very annoying to read just get rid of them or spell the f*n thing function.

> Modern C++ pretty much solves the safety issues.

I always wonder how can one come to such a conclusion. Modern C++ has no way to enforce relationship between two objects in memory and the shared xor mutable rule, which means it can't even do the basic checks that are the foundation of Rust's safety features.

Of course, this statement is also trivially debunked by the reality of any major C++ program with complexity and attack surface of something like a browser. Modern C++ certainly didn't save Chrome from CVEs. They ban a bunch of C++ features, enforce the rule of two, and do a bunch of hardening and fuzzing on top of it and they still don't get spared from safety issues.

FWIW Chrome includes third party libraries like freetype and lots of bugs are in javascript. I imagine defensive checks in javascript will be controversial since performance of javascript is controlled by webdev, not by browser.

Note that Chrome is replacing[1] FreeType with Skrifa[2], which is a Rust-based library that can handle a lot of the things FreeType is being used for in Chrome. A lot of Chrome's dependencies are being rewritten in Rust.

[1]: https://developer.chrome.com/blog/memory-safety-fonts

[2]: https://github.com/googlefonts/fontations/tree/main/skrifa

Yeah sure. Thing is, C does just fine people are making “safe” ways to run libc. Rust is a complicated monstrosity with a bunch of “unsafe” sprinkles.

What does the memory safety even matter when hackers poison heavily used crates?

> Modern C++ pretty much solves the safety issues.

The statistics from projects that have adopted Rust and measured the effect say otherwise. See https://security.googleblog.com/2025/11/rust-in-android-move... for example.

This article is not really specifying if Rust is compared against "Modern C++" or "Old School C++". The only thing we can assume is that at least part of it is "Google C++".

Maybe we would see similar effects adopting Modern C++. Maybe not. The article doesn't tell us.

Yeah I guess most True Scotsmen write modern C++ after all.

This is a very shallow, very boring criticism. I doubt it will resonate. Modern C++ does not solve the safety issues, it has plenty of brand new footguns like string_view. Who cares if Go is better than Rust? Feel free to write Go, no one cares.

"mut and fn very annoying to read" like okay lol who cares? What should anyone take from your post other than that you aren't that into Rust?

> Modern C++ pretty much solves the safety issues

The data says otherwise, three overflows and two UAFs this month in Chrome alone: https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-1224...

> Go is a better Rust. Rust is an ugly version of C++ with longer compile times and a band of zealous missionaries.

Eh. There's a lot I like about Go. I adore its compilation speed and the focus on language simplicity. But its got plenty of drawbacks too. Default nullability is a huge mistake. And result types (zig, swift, rust) are way better than go's error handling. Sum types in general are missing from Go, and once you start using them its so hard to go back. Go also doesn't have anywhere near as good interop with native code. Mixing C (or any other LLVM langauge) with rust is easy and feels great. You even get LTO across the language barrier.

The big thing I'm growing to dislike about rust is how many transitive dependencies a lot of projects end up pulling in. Its very easy to end up with projects that take a million years to compile & produce huge binaries. Not because they do a lot but simply because everything depends on everything, and the dependency tree takes a long time to bottom out. I don't know what the right answer is. It feels more like a cultural problem than a language / ecosystem problem. But I wish rust projects felt as lightweight and small as most C projects I've worked with. I'm doing some work with the stalwart email server at the moment (written in rust). Stalwart is a relatively new, well written email server. But it somehow pulls in 893 transitive dependencies! I'm not even joking. Compiling stalwart takes about 20 minutes, and the compilation process generates several gigabytes of intermediate build assets. What a mess.

> Compiling stalwart takes about 20 minutes

20 minutes! What hardware is this on? I've worked on Rust projects with similar numbers of dependencies where the compile time (for a clean release build) was 2-4 minutes (on a MacBook M1 Pro)

UPDATE: tried compiling stalwart on my machine, and it took 14 minutes, with a really weird timing profile:

- 99% of the ~700 crates were done compiling in about a minute or 2 - RocksDB (a C++ dependency) was 2 minutes by itself - And then it took 10 minutes (ten!) just for the final binary at the end.

That's not normal for Rust code at all. Even large ones like Servo or Rustc or Zed.

UPDATE2: turns out they have LTO enabled by default. Disabling that brings the compile time down to 7 minutes. But that's still really unexpectedly slow.

Disabling codegen units = 1 speeds up the compilation further. But it’s still too many dependencies and too slow. The binary is pretty huge too.

> But it’s still too many dependencies and too slow.

I definitely agree that it's too slow. I just don't think the cause is "too many dependencies" because I've compiled Rust codebases with twice as many dependencies in half the time!

It seems to produce a 94MB binary. So it may be partly that there are some very big dependencies. But the amount of compilation time that ends up in the top-level crate (even with LTO disabled) also makes me feel like this must be triggering a compiler bug. Either that or using far too many generics.

I agree it's probably monomorphization (speculation without looking at it). Generic function parameters might be the root cause, but number of dependencies is a combinatorial multiplier.

I've hit compiler bugs that behave this way. Here's one from an LLVM upgrade [1]. The test case I discovered apparently took over 20 minutes to compile, up from 26 seconds on stable! Their value tracking algorithm was accidentally quadratic.

[1]: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/137909

> But it’s still too many dependencies and too slow. The binary is pretty huge too.

Ah yes, my never-ending crusade to raise awareness that the cost of free (as in effort) dependencies is bloat.

You can make useful tools that are tiny and compile fast [1], but it takes a lot of effort; exactly what developers don't want to spend.

[1]: Like https://github.com/parasyte/hd -- And I wrote about one of the tricks that it uses: https://blog.kodewerx.org/2023/04/improving-build-times-for-...

> Sum types in general are missing from Go

Not quite. It doesn't have tagged unions, which is what I expect you are thinking of, but it does have sum types.

Only by abusing interface {}. The result is horrible.

Go doesn’t have sum types as a first class primitive.

Using interface as it was designed to be used offers first-class sum types. Although not all interface use equates to sum types.

But they're not tagged unions. I expect that is still where your confusion lies. Tagged unions and sum types are not equivalent. Tagged unions are a subset of sum types.

This may be a bit too pedantic, but I consider interface {} to be a way to do polymorphism via type classes. Interface defines an open class of types which implement some interface.

Sum types are a type definition defining something as A or B. Not “anything that quacks like a duck”. But concretely “one of this or one of that”. This enables different syntax, like the match expression to be used, in which you exhaustively list all the variants. The compiler doesn’t need to heap allocate enums because it knows the maximum size of a single value. The compiler and programmer can take advantage of the knowledge that there’s a closed set of values the type can hold. It’s not an open type class.

Result and Option are quite beautiful as sum types. But they’re horrible as type classes. Try implementing them using interface{} in Go. It’s not the same.

> Interface defines an open class of types

But can also define a closed set of types, perfectly satisfying "sum types".

> This enables different syntax, like the match expression to be used, in which you exhaustively list all the variants.

Go does not provide this out of the box, but that is not prerequisite for sum types. The mathematical theory says nothing about "the compiler must produce an error if the user doesn't match call cases". There is sufficient information provided by the sum types if you wish to add this to your build chain yourself, of course.

By that definition a void* pointer in C is a sum type. By that definition assembly has sum types.

This argument feels like the “we have sum types at home” meme. Ergonomics matter.

I write a lot of rust. Rust has traits which are similar to Go’s interfaces. But the features aren’t the same, and I use enum all the time. (I also use trait all the time, but I use trait and enum for different things).

> By that definition a void* pointer in C is a sum type.

No. That doesn't make any sense. void* is essentially equivalent to any in Go, which isn't sum types either.

You can construct sum types in C by combining structs, enums, and unions, but it is not an out of the box feature like in Go. Sum types are a first-class citizen in Go.

> Ergonomics matter.

Math doesn't care about ergonomics. You might care about ergonomics, but logically when talking about those ergonomics you'd call those ergonomics by name, not by some unrelated thing from type theory.

> You can construct sum types in C by combining structs and unions, but it is not an out of the box feature like in Go. Sum types are a first-class citizen in Go.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you mean. Can you give me an example? How would you write a Result type in Go? (Result is defined as either Ok(val) or Err(err))

C:

    enum result_type {
        OK,
        ERROR
    };

    union result_value {    
        int value;
        char *error_message;
    };

    struct result {
        enum result_type tag;
        union result_value value;
    };

Go:

    type Result interface {
        isResult()
    }

    type OK[T any] struct {
        Value T
    }
    func (OK[T]) isResult() {}

    type Error struct {
        Message string
    }
    func (Error) isResult() {}

I'm curious, if tagged unions are a subset of sum type, what is your definition of "sum type"?

AFAIK, tagged union is sum type, based on sum type mathematical definition.

On second thought, I agree with your definition. So Go does, in fact, have tagged unions.

    > People need to learn how to use tools properly.

> C++ is a dying language compared to Rust.

there is a good chance Rust will start dying and will actually die by being replaced by some new hyper-overengineered lang much faster than C++ actually die.

If C++ died for services under Unix and medium sized indie games (such as I2PD, or Cataclysm DDA and its forks) and these where rewritten in Go the maintenance would be far greater in these projects. A GC, a much better cross compatibility and your code for sure could probably be compiled in 10 years.

Also CDDA:Bn wouldn't damn need a > 40h long build using 1.5 GB of RAM under an n270 netbook. Ditto with Nchat, FFS, which is worse. A Golang counterpart for nchat as a TG client (and tdlib rewritten in Go) would weight far less while compiling and maybe even the binary itself, and performance wise it would be similar.

I still remember tons of C++ projects from 2005-2009 impossible to compile today but with GCC 4.3 or GCC 4.9, can't remember. Not because of the size, but because C++ incompatible changes over the years. At least tons of C code will compile it today as is modulo some POSIX changes from C code pre 1996. C++ it's something that should died long ago, among stuff like locales under Unix. UTF8 everywhere, use your own currency and the like.

Yeah, I know, game engines, and tons of physics engines and libraries even FLOSS ones such as OGRE, gdal and the like are C++ domain. Still, most of these could be ported to C.

As for Go minimalism can anybody explain why logcli is so big https://github.com/grafana/loki/releases just to download logs from kubernetes?

The reality of such platform is observable in Inferno and Plan 9, that had no C++ compilers, and while Alef failed in Plan 9, Limbo came to be in Inferno.

Likewise, trying to write pure C or C++ services in iOS or Android is more pain than gain.

The good news is as of now ladyboy doesn't have any competition.

Rarely if ever is anything able to compete simply by being "better". As far as USPs go it's just not enough. I reckon for ladyboy the USP (if any) is going to be it being open and NOT chrome (or derivative). So "safe" "modern" language is not going to mean much to the end users.

The context matters when we talk about Joel's article[0].

It's about Netscape. By the time, Netscape had dominated the browser market. It was the leader and that means they had all the market share to lose. You can bet Microsoft's decision makers were very closely monitoring what those at Netscape were doing.

Today, practically nobody uses Ladybird. No one even knows it[1]. It's so behind and has nothing to lose. If you really want to rewrite, it's better to do it when you have nothing to lose.

[0]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

[1]: to quote Joel, "no one" means less than one million people.

Nearly 26 years ago! https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

What's different today really is the LLMs and coding agents. The reason to never rewrite in another language is that it requires you to stop everything else for months or even years. Stopping for two weeks is a lot less likely to kill your project.

> What's different today really is the LLMs and coding agents.

In Ladybird's case, tests they could rely upon.

He's still right if you don't have good automated testing and you lost most of the original developers (or you don't have other seniors ceva familiar with the domain).

Hah, yeah if you don't have a comprehensive test suite any rewrite will be a disaster - step one is to get the test suite up to code.

> then these two teams are essentially in a race against each other and the port will likely never catch up

Ladybird appears to have the discipline to have recognized this: “[Rust] is not becoming the main focus of the project. We will continue developing the engine in C++, and porting subsystems to Rust will be a sidetrack that runs for a long time.”

And I might suggest that there's the possibility that the C++ code could end up being more cleanly ported to a memory-safe subset of C++. plug: https://github.com/duneroadrunner/scpptool/blob/master/appro...

Exactly my thought! I guess I'll keep Firefox for the foreseeable future...

Firefox is already spying on you with a lot of telemetry, and they have recently amended their terms of use to remove the obligation to "never sell your data" [1]. So perhaps you should reconsider that statement.

[1] : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43213612

Surely nobody's using them forks which exist for no reason whatsoever.

> A startup switching languages after years of development is usually a big red flag.

Startups are not a good comparison here. They have a different relationship with code than software projects.

Linux has rewriten entire stacks over and over again.

The PHP engine was rewritten completely at least twice.

The musl libc had entire components rewritten basically from scratch and later integrated.

Spending weeks porting (presumably) working code with LLM is a bit strange

that's only the mechanical translation too

the hard bit (borrow checker) has still to be done...

Twitter is the canonical startup rewrite. It worked.

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.

For a personal thing I had AI write some python libraries to power a cli. It has to do with simple excel file filtering, grouping and aggregating. Nothing too fancy. However since it's backed by a library, I am playing with different UIs for the same thing and it's fun to say.. Do it with streamlit. Oh it can't do this particular thing. Fine do it with shiny. No? OK Dash. It takes only like an hour to prototype with a whole new UI library then I get to say "nah" like a spoiled child. :)

Well, I am on the provocative side that as AI tooling matures current programming languages will slowly become irrelevant.

I am already using low code tooling with agents for some projects, in iPaaS products.

> Well, I am on the provocative side that as AI tooling matures current programming languages will slowly become irrelevant.

I have the opposite opinion. As LLM become ubiquitous and code generation becomes cheap, the choice of language becomes more important.

The problem with LLM for me is that it is now possible to write anything using only assembly. While technically possible, who can possibly read and understand the mountain of code that it is going to generate?

I use LLM at work in Python. It can, and will, easily use hacks upon hacks to get around things.

Thus I maintain that as code generation is cheap, it is more important to constraint that code generation.

All of this assume that you care even a tiny bit about what is happening in your code. If you don't, I suppose you can keep banging the LLM to fix that binary blob for you.

> The problem with LLM for me is that it is now possible to write anything using only assembly. While technically possible, who can possibly read and understand the mountain of code that it is going to generate?

As a very practical problem the assembly would consume the context window like no other. And another is having some static guardrails; sometimes LLMs make mistakes, and without guard rails it debugging some of them becomes quite a big workload.

So to keep things efficient, an LLM would first need to create its own programming language. I think we'll actually see some proposals for a token-effective language that has good abstraction abilities for this exact use.

Lets say years of offshoring projects have helped to reach that opinion.

> As LLM become ubiquitous and code generation becomes cheap, the choice of language becomes more important.

I think, changes to languages/tooling to accomodate Agentic loops will become important.

> All of this assume that you care even a tiny bit about what is happening in your code. If you don't...

I mean, as software engineers, we most certainly do. I suspect there'll be a new class of "developers" who will have their own way of making software, dealing with bugs, building debugging tools that suit their SDLC etc. LLMs will be to software development what Relativity was to Astrophysics, imo: A fundamental & permanent shift.

There is the notion that a lot of programming language preferences are based on the notion of people using them. As soon as it's LLMs using them, a lot of what motivates their choices becomes less valid.

I've been doing a few projects that are definitely outside my comfort zone with LLMs and its fine. I can read the code but I just don't have the muscle memory to produce it.

I don't agree. For one thing, the language directly impacts things like iteration speed, runtime performance, and portability. For another, there's a trade-off between "verbose, eats context" and "implicit, hard to reason about".

IMO Rust will strike a very strong balance here for LLMs.

Formal specifications and automated testing, will beat any language specific tooling.

Hardly much different than dealing with traditional offshoring projects output.

> Formal specifications and automated testing, will beat any language specific tooling.

I don't understand what you mean. Beat any language at what? Correctness? I don't think that's true at all, but I also don't see how that's relevant, it definitely doesn't address the fact that Rust will virtually always produce faster code than the majority of other languages.

> Hardly much different than dealing with traditional offshoring projects output.

I don't know what you mean here either.

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 language that's better, but of course anyone would agree.

> Also there is the alternative path to execute code via agents workestration, just like low code tooling work.

I don't understand how this is relevant.

> I see you never had the fortune to review code provided by cheap offshoring teams.

I just don't understand why you're bringing it up tbh I don't understand the relevance.

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.

I feel like maybe we're drifting here. You said this:

> Well, I am on the provocative side that as AI tooling matures current programming languages will slowly become irrelevant.

And I said I disagree because language directly impacts things like performance. And it does, massively. Like, order of magnitude differences are not hard to achieve simply by changing language.

You are now saying that things just need to be "fast enough", but I don't get how that's relevant. The point is that a different language will have different tradeoffs, and AI changes some of the calculus there, but language is still a major component of the produced artifact. If you agree that language has major implications on the produced artifact, then we agree. If you don't, then I'll just once again appeal to the massive performance gaps between different languages.

I still am not understanding the offshoaring conversation.

> And I said I disagree because language directly impacts things like performance. And it does, massively. Like, order of magnitude differences are not hard to achieve simply by changing language.

Only because you focus too much into the frontend, instead of the whole compiler infrastructure, with multiple frontends for the same compilation pipeline.

> I still am not understanding the offshoaring conversation.

Because you never had to review human written code by cheap offshoring teams, zero difference with LLM generated code quality, even today.

The frontend to a language is critical to how that language performs. I don't see how you can consider this irrelevant.

If the offshore company provides me a Rust crate that compiles, that is already a lot of guarantee. Now that does not solve the logic issues and you still need testing.

But testing in Python is so easy to abuse as LLM. It will create mocks upon mocks of classes and dynamically patch functions to get things going. Its hell to review.

What is a programming language used for if not the most formal specification possible? Of course it doesn't matter what language you use if you perfectly describe the behavior of the program. Of course, there's also no point in using LLMs (or outsourcing!) at that point.

Im already using models to reason about and summarize part of the code from programming language to prose. They are good at that. I can see the process being something like english to machine lang, machine lang to english if the human needs to understand. However amother truism is that compilers are a great guardrail against bad generated code. More deterministic guardrails are good for llms. So yeah im not there yet where i trust binaries to the statistical text generators.

I would say that current programming languages have a better chance due to the huge amount of code that AI can train on. New languages do not have that leverage. Moreover, current languages have large ecosystems that still matter.

I see the opposite. New languages have more difficulty breaking into popularity due to lack of enough existing codename and ecosystems.

Interesting take, what do you think comes next? A programming language optimized for coding agents?

Kind of, more in line with formal specs used in high integrity computing, instead of classical programming languages.

> This is not becoming the main focus of the project. We will continue developing the engine in C++, and porting subsystems to Rust will be a sidetrack that runs for a long time.

I don't like this bit. Wouldn't it be better to decide on a memory-safe language, and then commit to it by writing all new code in Rust, or whatever. This looks like doing double the work.

It doesn't have to all-or-nothing. Firefox has been a mixed C++ and Rust codebase for years now. It isn't like the code is written twice. The C++ components are written in C++, and the Rust components are written in Rust.

I suspect that'll also be what happens here. And if the use of Rust is successful, then over time more components may switch over to Rust. But each component will only ever be in one language at a time.

You can't compare the choices made to evolve a >20 years old codebase with a brand new one. Firefox also as Rust support for XPCOM components, so you can use and write them in Rust without manual FFI (this comes with some baggage of course).

The Ladybird devs painted themselves in a corner when choosing C++ for a new web browser, with many anti-Rust folks claiming that "modern C++ was safe". Well...

> The Ladybird devs painted themselves in a corner when choosing C++ for a new web browser

That choice was never made. C++ was selrcted as the language of choice for SerenityOS. Since the goal of the OS was to make its founder happy, and C++ was his faviourite language at the time, that seems like an obvious choice. Later, as part of SerenityOS, there was a need for an HTML parser. It was written in C++ as was the rest of the operating system. Then that HTML parser evolved into a full web browser. As part of the SerenityOS project, that browser was written completely in C++. Then that web browser forked off into an independent project...

Ladybird was already a fully functioning browser (not finished of course but complete enough to surf many web pages) when it was forked from SerenityOS to create a stand-alone web browser. The choice at that point was "keep evolving the current C++ code base" or start-over. I doubt the second option was even considered.

They have been evaluating other languages since before the fork. Rust was evaluated and rejectd early-on. They even created their own language at one point. https://github.com/SerenityOS/jakt

> The Ladybird devs painted themselves in a corner when choosing C++ for a new web browser, with many anti-Rust folks claiming that "modern C++ was safe". Well...

Perhaps, but in fairness the project was started in 2018 when Rust was still new and unproven.

> You can't compare the choices made to evolve a >20 years old codebase with a brand new one.

I guess not, but I'm pretty optimistic about Ladybird's ability to adopt Rust if they want to. It's a much smaller codebase than Firefox (~650K LoC).

This initial PR is already ~25k LoC, so approximately 4% of the codebase. It took 1 person 2 weeks to complete. If you extrapolate from that, it would take 1 person-year to port the whole thing, which is not so bad considering that you could spread that work out over multiple years and multiple people.

And Firefox has shown that the intermediate state where you have a mix of languages is viable over the long term, even in a much larger and more complex codebase.

> Perhaps, but in fairness the project was started in 2018 when Rust was still new and unproven.

Rust was already proven in 2018, and I'm pretty sure they went with C++ for other reasons.

Firefox was special in that Mozilla created Rust to build Servo and then backported parts of Servo to Firefox and ultimately stopped building Servo.

Thankfully Servo has picked up speed again and if one wants a Rust based browser engine what better choice than the one the language was built to enable?

https://servo.org/

As a Servo contributor, I am aware of Servo :)

But I'm also cheering along Ladybird's progress. There's definitely room for more than one project in the space. And IMO the more browsers being built in Rust in the better.

One could do that but then they'd lose all momentum and the project would never get finished.

> Wouldn't it be better to decide on a memory-safe language,

it is totally possible to use some strict subset of C++, which will be memory safe.

Only in theory. In practice it never happens like that. I mean, you think Google wouldn't use that for Chrome if they could?

google is giant and chaotic, and chrome likely is spagetti code mess. Its hard to tell if their approach is reasonable and fully implemented without digging deep.

I work on such project, where we use simplified C++, and it works fine, no memory corruptions in my experience.

Ladybird already does that

> After the initial translation, I ran multiple passes of adversarial review, asking different models to analyze the code for mistakes and bad patterns.

I feel like you just know it’s doomed. What this is saying is “I didn’t want to and cannot review the code it generated” asking models to find mistakes never works for me. It’ll find obvious patterns, a tendency towards security mistakes, but not deep logical errors.

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 me is whether this part will actually come in time or not:

> The Rust code intentionally mimics things like the C++ register allocation patterns so that the two compilers produce identical bytecode. Correctness is a close second. We know the result isn’t idiomatic Rust, and there’s a lot that can be simplified once we’re comfortable retiring the C++ pipeline. That cleanup will come in time.

Of course, it wouldn't be the first time Andreas delivered more than I expected :).

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?

Your argument is just as applicable on human code reviewers. Obviously having others review the code will catch issues you would never have thought of. This includes agents as well.

They’re not equal. Humans are capable of actually understanding and looking ahead at consequences of decisions made, whereas an LLM can’t. One is a review, one is mimicking the result of a hypothetical review without any of the actual reasoning. (And prompting itself in a loop is not real reasoning)

I keep hearing people say "but as humans we actually understand". What evidence do you have of the material differences in what understanding an LLM has, and what version a human has? What processes do we fundamentally do, that an LLM does not or cannot do? What here is the definition of "understanding", that, presumably an LLM does not currently do, that humans do?

Well a material difference is we don’t input/output in tokens I guess. We have a concept of gaps and limits to knowledge, we have factors like ego, preservation, ambition that go into our thoughts where LLM just has raw data. Understanding the implication of a code change is having an idea of a desired structure, some idea of where you want to head to and how that meshes together. LLM has zero of any of that. Just because it can copy the output of the result of those factors I mention doesn’t mean they operate the same.

https://ml-site.cdn-apple.com/papers/the-illusion-of-thinkin...

With humans though, I wouldn't have to review 20k lines of code at once.

So ask the AI to just translate one little chunk at a time, right?

That's not what happened here though.

>Your argument is just as applicable on human code reviewers.

The tests many of us use for how capable a model or harness is is usually based around whether they can spot logical errors readily visible to humans.

Hence: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47031580

That is what the testing suite is there to check, no?

No. Testing generally can only falsify, not verify. It’s complementary to code review, not a substitute for it.

You mean the testing suite generated by AI?

The primary JS test suite is maintained by the authors of the specification itself: https://github.com/tc39/test262

It isn’t, in this case.

No, a real test suite, either their own which they developped or the official ECMA one

Yeah, I lost all interest in the ladybird project now that it is AI slop.

No one wants to work with this generated, ugly, unidiomatic ball of Rust. Other than other people using AI. So you dependency AI grows and grows. It is a vicious trap.

> We know the result isn’t idiomatic Rust, and there’s a lot that can be simplified once we’re comfortable retiring the C++ pipeline. That cleanup will come in time.

I wonder what kind of tech debt this brings and if the trade off will be worth whatever problems they were having with C++.

the tech debt risk in this case is mostly in the cleanup phase, not the port itself. non-idiomatic Rust that came from C++ tends to have a lot of raw pointer patterns and manual lifetime management that works fine but hides implicit ownership assumptions. when you go to make it idiomatic, the borrow checker forces those assumptions to be explicit, and sometimes you discover the original structure doesn't compose well with Rust's aliasing rules. servo went through this. the upside is you catch real latent bugs in the process.

It depends. I migrated a 20k loc c++ project to rust via AI recently and I would say it did so pretty well. There is no unsafe or raw pointer usage. It did add Rc<RefCell in a bunch of places to make things happy, but that ultimately caught some real bugs in the original code. Refactoring it to avoid shared memory (and the need for Rc<RefCell<>> wasn't very difficult, but keeping the code structure identical at first allowed us to continue to work on the c++ code while the rust port was ongoing and keep the rust port aligned without needing to implement the features twice.

I would say modern c++ written by someone already familiar with rust will probably be structured in a way that's extremely easy to port because you end up modeling the borrow checker in your brain.

> I would say modern c++ written by someone already familiar with rust will probably be structured in a way that's extremely easy to port because you end up modeling the borrow checker in your brain.

I can't stress out how much important this sentence is. I would even remove the "familiar with rust" part.

Anyone who still thinks it's good to use C/CPP on modern hardware where Rust support is available and good: please print the sentence above and post it all over your place.

The reason folks still use c/c++ is because of ecosystem. Chances are you have a lot of code you depend on and don't have straightforward ways to port it (and all the transitive deps). Especially in the case of larger enterprise software where there are 10s of millions of lines keeping you entrenched. Foundational things like your threading model, async executor, etc can make it difficult. If you're operating in a micro service environment and your core does are both minimal and ported, the journey becomes much more tractable.

I assumed new projects but I just realised that I didn’t write it.

But still disagree: we have cbindgen.

Yes, I just translated a Rust library from non-idiomatic and unsafe Rust to idiomatic and safe Rust and it was as much work as if I had rewritten it from scratch.

This is what I was trying to highlight in my post.

yeah, matches what I'd expect. when you're porting idiomatic -> idiomatic within a language, the cleanup is mechanical. crossing from C++ to Rust means the borrow checker surfaces assumptions that were latent in the original code, so you end up redesigning rather than translating. that's not a complaint about Rust -- it's actually doing its job.

I don't think they were having problems with C++, they moved to Rust for memory safety. Mind that they migrated LibJS, their JavaScript library.

Andreas Kling mentioned many times they would prefer a safer language, specifically for their js runtime garbage collector. But since the team were already comfortable with cpp that was the choice, but they were open and active seeking alternatives.

The problem was strictly how cpp is perceived as an unsafe language, and this problem rust does solve! Not being sarcastic, this truly looks like a mature take. Like, we don't know if moving to rust would improve quality or prevent vulnerabilities, here's our best effort to find out and ignore if the claim has merits for now. If the claim maintains, well, you're better prepared, if it doesn't, but the code holds similar qualities...what is the downside?

> We previously explored Swift, but the C++ interop never quite got there, and platform support outside the Apple ecosystem was limited.

Why was there ever any expectation for Swift having good platform support outside Apple? This should have been (and was to me) already obvious when they originally announced moving to Swift.

Apple’s own marketing speak has Swift as a cross platform language. Just like, I suppose, C# is a cross platform language.

Apple puts zero resources into making that claim reality, however.

Apple actually did put some resources behind it, the toolchain is reasonably pleasant to use outside macOS and Xcode, they have people building an ecosystem in the Swift Server Workgroup, and arguably some recent language design decisions don't seem to be purely motivated by desktop/mobile usage.

But in the end I can't help but feel Swift has become an absolute beast of a multi-paradigm language with even worse compile times than Rust or C++ for dubious ergonomics gains.

A language is more than a compiler. All of the Swift frameworks you would need to do anything actually useful or interesting in the language are macOS-only. You cannot develop in Swift for Windows/Linux/Android the way that you develop in Swift for macOS/iOS. That matters.

You don't need to convince me that Swift is poorly positioned there, but if you only care about server side (or possibly CLI) apps, the usable ecosystem on Linux isn't too shabby.

Does it make sense compared to C#, Go, Rust or a JVM language? I don't know, but it's there, and Apple put some resources behind the initiative.

I think it is comparable to C#, at least C# a decade or more ago. Back then it was a great language for developing GUI applications on Windows, Unity games, and that's about it. Now there's a blossoming community of cross-platform frameworks, but only because Microsoft invested in making those first-class. Apple hasn't been putting that effort into Swift.

Microsoft cross platform effort always pushed forward Web development and distributed systems, hardly "that's about it".

And if you mean before the whole .NET Core rewrite, many big corp server applications were already written in .NET, products like SharePoint, Sitecore, Optimizely, Dynamics 365, Four51,.... and plenty of server infrastructure for XBox and Windows games.

Was it Apple, or community driven projects?

> Just like, I suppose, C#

Have you actually used .NET on Linux/macOS? I have (both at home and work) and there isn't anything that made me think it was neglected on those platforms. Everything just works™

It didn't use to be that way, for a very long time.

What didn't work and when?

It's been 10 years of it running on Linux.

People here need time to notice XD

When it wasn't that way, they never had any marketing speak that suggested that though?

From their post on Twitter in 2024 when they adopted Swift, with a comment on Rust.

My general thoughts on Rust:

- Excellent for short-lived programs that transform input A to output B

- Clunky for long-lived programs that maintain large complex object graphs

- Really impressive ecosystem

- Toxic community

https://xcancel.com/awesomekling/status/1822241531501162806

Mayhaps he had a Damascene conversion? Not that I ever understood the need to change from C++ in the first place though.

Considering David Tolnay's indefensible treatment of JeanHeyd Meneide, I'm inclined to agree with Kling on the toxicity of the Rust community. Evangelical fervor does not excuse douchebaggery.

Most likely some big sponsor requires them turn to AI slops.

All the best to them, however this feels like yah shaving instead of focusing into delivering a browser than can become an alternative to Safari/Chrome duopoly.

Part of browser experience is safety and migrating their JS library to Rust is probably one of the best ways to gain advantage over any other existing engine out there in this aspect. Strategically this may and likely will attract 3rd party users of the JS library itself, thus helping its adoption and further improving it.

They're not porting the browser itself to Rust, for the record.

Yet, they are open to further rewrites.

Your rant was about their loss of focus, not about them being open to other changes. Moving goalposts!

Not at all, on my book that is the same as losing focus.

Javascript is a self contained sub system, if the public API stays the same, then they can rewrite as much as they want, also I suppose this engine now will attract new contributors that will want to contribute to Ladybird just because they enjoy working with Rust.

Don't forget that the Rust ecosystem around browsers is growing, Firefox already uses it for their CSS engine[0], AFAIK Chrome JPEG XL implementation is written in Rust.

So I don't see how this could be seen as a negative move, I don't think sharing libraries in C++ is as easy as in Rust.

[0] https://github.com/servo/stylo

Not only is Firefox using it for their CSS engine but Mozilla created Rust to build Servo and sadly only the CSS engine and maybe some other parts is what they kept around when they offloaded Rust.

“the Rust ecosystem around browsers is growing” – in the beginning pretty much 100% of the ecosystem around Rust was browser oriented

Thankfully Servo is picking up speed again and is a great project to help support with some donations etc: https://servo.org/

Maybe it is my cynicism, but I always suspect such projects to be endless rabbit chasing. It is not about catching it.

Agreed. They said they ruled out rust in 2024, I believe the article they published was near the end of 2024 because I remember reading it fairly recently.

Seems like a lot of language switches in a short time frame. That'd make me super nervous working on such a project. There will be rough parts for every language and deciding seemingly on whims that 1 isn't good enough will burn a lot of time and resources.

think of it as axe sharpening rather than yak shaving

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.

I went to check if this was documented in the list of undocumented HN features on GitHub but it’s not.

There is an open PR (by simonw btw): https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented/pull/4...

    > classic HackerNews title shortening algorithm

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.

It's been confirmed by @dang many times before. I'm not sure if that's what cut the title here but I've seen it many times in the last 10 years.

I've seen it happen a couple times, iirc, it removes things after commas, and removes certain words as well

Adds [video] to YouTube links, too.

A LLM-assisted codebase migration is perhaps one of the better use cases for them, and interestingly the author advocates for a hands-on approach.

Adding the "with help from AI" almost always devolves the discussion from that to "developers must adopt AI or else!" on the one hand and "society is being destroyed by slop!" on the other, so as long as that's not happening I'm not complaining about the editorialized title.

I think we've come to the point when it should be the opposite for any new code, something in line of: "done without AI". Bein an old fart working in software development I have many friends working as very senior developers. Every single one of them including yours truly uses AI.

I use AI more and more. Goes like create me classes A,B,C with such and such descriptive names, take this state machine / flowchart description to understand the flow and use this particular sets of helpers declared in modules XYZ

I then test the code and then go over and look at any un-optimal and other patterns I prefer not to have and asking to change those.

After couple of iterations code usually shines. I also cross check final results against various LLMs just in case

> We will continue developing the engine in C++, and porting subsystems to Rust will be a sidetrack that runs for a long time.

So, even though they want the code base to be in Rust, they will continue writing new code in C++ and then translating it to Rust later to remove the C++ they just added.

There must be a really good reason for this, such as Rust doesn’t interop well with C++, otherwise this seems like a poor decision.

Isn't the reason simply that they want to code in C++? This is a passion project.

> Isn't the reason simply that they want to code in C++?

I don't know that that is the reason, given the opening lines of the article:

We’ve been searching for a memory-safe programming language to replace C++ in Ladybird for a while now. We previously explored Swift, but the C++ interop never quite got there, and platform support outside the Apple ecosystem was limited. Rust is a different story. The ecosystem is far more mature for systems programming, and many of our contributors already know the language. Going forward, we are rewriting parts of Ladybird in Rust.

Cool, that seems like a rational choice. I hope this will help Ladybird and Servo benefit from each other in the long run, and will make both of them more likely to succeed

Definitely, would be great to see a Servo-based Ladybird.

I hope it does not -> because we don't more browser crossbreeding

Small browsers need to unite if they ever hope to become relevant.

Someone should try this with the “Ralph Wiggum loop” approach. I suspect it would fail spectacularly, but it would be fascinating to watch.

Personally, I can’t get meaningful results unless I use the tool in a true pair-programming mode—watching it reason, plan, and execute step by step. The ability to clearly articulate exactly what you want, and how you want it done, is becoming a rare skill.

Given the quality of their existing test suite I'm confident the Ralph Wiggum loop would produce a working implementation... but the code quality wouldn't be anywhere near what they got from two weeks of hands-on expert prompting.

Sure yeah, I can buy that, but that would be like collecting tech debt for generations.

    > Ralph Wiggum loop

https://ghuntley.com/loop/ and https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/blob/main/plugins/...

Looks like it's been renamed to ralph-loop for legal reasons. :D

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-plugins-official/pull/1...

Very happy to see this. Ladybird's engineering generally seems excellent, but the decision to use Swift always seemed pretty "out there". Rust makes a whole lot more sense.

Servo makes a whole lot more sense: https://servo.org/

Can you send a Gmail in Servo? No?

Ladybird is much further ahead in terms of actually rendering web pages that people use.

The biggest advantage to Servo was that it is written in Rust. This move begins to nullify that advantage as well.

Why exactly does Servo make more sense?

I hope they both succeed. But Ladybird is more likely to become a usable browser first.

This move was only to port a part of their JS runtime pieces to Rust, that's it.

> We previously explored Swift, but the C++ interop never quite got there

But Rust doesn't have C++ interop at all?

You can do it via the C ABI, and use opaque pointers to represent higher-level Rust/C++ concepts if you want to.

Firefox is a mixed C++ / Rust codebase with a relatively close coupling between Rust and C++ components in places (layout/dom/script are in C++ while style is in Rust, and a mix of WebRender (Rust) and Skia (C++) are used for rendering with C++ glue code)

> You can do it via the C ABI, and use opaque pointers to represent higher-level Rust/C++ concepts

Yeah but, you can do the same in Swift

My understanding from a brief read of the Swift issue is that they kept running into bugs in the Swift compiler which, in practice, prevented them from doing the things that they ought to be do in theory. This went on for long enough, that they got fed up and abandoned Swift.

The Rust compiler is incredibly solid (across all target platforms), and while it's C/C++ interop is relatively simplistic, what does exist is extensively battle tested in production codebases.

>But Rust doesn't have C++ interop at all?

It also doesn't have the disadvantages of Swift. Once the promise of Swift/C++ interop is gone there isn't enough left to recommend it.

I’m curious what issues people were running into with Swift’s built in C++ interop? I haven’t had the chance to use it myself, but it seemed reasonable to me at a surface level.

There's a list of unsolved problems in this Ladybird issue, now closed because they dropped Swift: https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird/issues/933

for example: "Swift fails to import clang modules with #include <math.h> with libstdc++-15 installed. Workaround: None (!!)"

Yeah, that part doesn't make much sense to me. IMO, Swift has reasonably good C++ interop[1] and Swift's C interop has also significantly improved[2] since Swift 6.2.

[1]: https://www.swift.org/documentation/cxx-interop/

[2]: https://www.swift.org/blog/improving-usability-of-c-librarie...

It may have in the future. Crubit is one effort in this direction: https://crubit.rs/

There is also cxx.rs, which is quite nice, albeit you have to struggle sending `std` types back and forth a bit

> albeit you have to struggle sending `std` types back and forth a bit

Firefox solves this partly by not using `std` types.

For example, https://github.com/mozilla/thin-vec exists in large part because it's compatible with Firefox's existing C++ Vec/Array implementation (with the bonus that it's only 8 bytes on the stack compared to 24 for the std Vec).

Luckily, ladybird also does not use `std` types

Rust has cxx which I would argue is "good enough" for most use cases. At least all C++ use cases I have. Not perfect, but pretty damn reasonable.

It's technically Rust -> C -> C++ as it stands right now

> If you look at the code, you’ll notice it has a strong “translated from C++” vibe. That’s because it is translated from C++. The top priority for this first pass is compatibility with our C++ pipeline. The Rust code intentionally mimics things like the C++ register allocation patterns so that the two compilers produce identical bytecode. Correctness is a close second. We know the result isn’t idiomatic Rust, and there’s a lot that can be simplified once we’re comfortable retiring the C++ pipeline.

Does this still get you most of the memory-safety benefits of using Rust vs C++?

I think this largely depends on how much unsafe Rust they produced.

I know he doesn't make live coding videos anymore, but it'd be cool if Andreas showed off how this worked a little more. I'm curious how much he had to fix by hand (vs reprompting or spinning a different model or whatever).

You can checkout the pull requests related to LibJS: https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird/pulls?q=is%3Apr+...

What happened? It’s been awhile since I checked in but it seems he doesn’t work on serenity and doesn’t live stream anymore (and is now into lifting weights)

He got his serenity and at the same time ladybird browser started getting somewhere, so he separated it out and went full on with it. From what I know, he was working on browsers before at Apple, so it was like he got ready to return

Porting the JS parser to Rust and adopting Rust in other parts of the engine while continuing to use C++ heavily is unlikely to make Ladybird meaningfully more secure.

Attackers are surprisingly resilient to partial security.

[flagged]

No, just saying facts

The "human-directed, not autonomous" framing is the part people keep glossing over. Claude Code here is a compiler-level translation tool, you are still the architect deciding what gets ported and in what order.

The real question is what this does to migrations that never happened because 18 months of rewrite did not pencil out. A 2-week port fundamentally changes that calculus.

(Un?)ironically enough, Mr Kling was one of the people that (indirectly) first got my attention wrt LLM coding.

I watched some of his streams on the development of the JIT compiler (what this change set seems to replace) on one of his streams, and was blown away by the quality of Copilot generated suggestions/completions on an (under-represented) domain (x86 opcodes, etc). This was before Claude Code et al, and pretty early-on for LLM tooling.

I hope that this opens the door for collaboration between Ladybird and Servo, no need to reinvent the wheel for core components.

I thought the entire point of Ladybird was precisely to reinvent the wheel?

This is also the case for Servo, so it makes sense to collaborate.

Servo has a distinct design goal that sets it apart from its predecessor within Mozilla and has already had offsprings that has made its way directly into Firefox.

Its purpose is not to reinvent everything. It’s not a hype project.

Servo's original purpose was to reinvent everything for Firefox to modernize the codebase, and make it secure and more performant (e.g. CSS styling engine, HTML parser, etc.) So it actually fits that purpose pretty well.

Unfortunately licence incompatibility may prevent that. Ladybird is BSD and Servo is MPL. This is also why there is only limited collaboration between Servo and the Rust GUI ecosystem.

Commenting about not reinventing the wheel on a Ladybird post is ironic

Is there any discussion on why D or even Ada was not considered? These languages have been around for long time. If they were willing to use llm to break the initial barrier to entry for a new language, then a case can be made for these languages as well.

They already made the mistake picking a niche language twice (first their own language, then Swift as a cross-platform language), why would you want them to make it a third time?

What kind of response is this? I was asking if there was any technical evaluation on other languages. And D and Ada are not niche. They have been battle tested in critical software.

Swift had/has some problems in the language itself. It's not because of the niche nature of Swift that was the problem iirc.

I don't think this is the right response because certainly a meaningful discussion could've definitely taken place and given how they were already open to other languages which was the reason why they picked Swift in the first place.

I remember Andreas video where he talked about how people used rust in his codebase and they were so happy but later it became very difficult whereas they found with swift that it became easier to manage. That was the reason why they picked swift that time.

Certainly their goal wasn't to pick a popular language (because if that's what you want use python or JS) but rather a language that was relevant to what they were building.

So if D and Ada were relevant or not, that's the main point of discussion imo.

I've dabbled a bit in Ada, but it wouldn't be my choice either. It's still susceptible to memory errors. It's better behaved than C, but you still have to be careful. And the tooling isn't great, and there isn't a lot in terms of libraries. I think Ladybird also has aspirations to build their own OS, so portability could also be an issue.

Not the case with spark. But I understand it requires writing lot of things from scratch for browsers. But I don’t think portability will be an issue with Ada, it is cross platform.

However, this is where d shines. D has a mature ecosystem. Offers first class cpp abi and provides memory safety guarantees, which the blog mentioned as a primary factor. And d is similar to cpp, low barrier for cpp devs to pick up.

There's no dynamic memory allocation with (100%) Spark. That's really limiting. You can to write "unsafe" code, but that has the same problems as Ada.

I thought SPARK got dynamic memory allocation when it adopted Rust-style ownership and borrowing in 2014.

That is true for parsers like libjs, but again crypto module or even networking, can still be written in spark, which is much more safety critical.

SPARK is not used for the whole system, but for the < 5% parts, which are safety/security-related in a good architecture.

Probably contributing reasons? I imagine over time they will have a lot more Rust contributors than D or Ada.

Unfortunately a really good question gets downvoted instead of causing a relevant discussion, as so often in recent HN. It would be really interesting to know, why Ada would not be considered for such a large project, especially now when the code is translated with LLMs, as you say. I was never really comfortable that they were going for the most recent C++ versions, since there are still too many differences and unimplemented parts which make cross-compiler compatibilty an issue. I hope that with Rust at least cross-compilation is possible, so that the resulting executable also runs on older systems, where the toolchain is not available.

Unfortunately some folks do get bit sensitive on rust, that can be off putting.

But what I wanted to know was about evaluation with other languages, because Andreas has written complex software.

His insight might become enriching as to shortcomings or other issues which developers not that high up in the chain, may not have encountered.

Ultimately, that will only help others to understand how to write better software or think about scalability.

I personally think that people might've framed it as use Ada/D over rust comment which might have the HN people who prefer rust to respond with downvotes.

I agree that, this might be wrong behaviour and I don't think its any fault of rust itself which itself could be a blanket statement imo. There's nuance in both sides of discussions.

Coming to the main point, I feel like the real reason could be that rust is this sort of equilibra that the world has reached for, especially security related projects. Whether good or bad, this means that using rust would definitely lead to more contributor resources and the zeal of rustaceans can definitely be used as well and also third party libraries developed in rust although that itself is becoming a problem nowadays from what I hear from people in here who use rust sometimes (ie. too many dependencies)

Rust does seem to be good enough for this use case. I think the question could be on what D/Ada (Might I also add Nim/V/Odin) will add further to the project but I honestly agree that a fruitful discussion b/w other languages would've been certainly beneficial to the project (imo) and at the very least would've been very interesting to read personally

> which might have the HN people who prefer rust to respond with downvotes.

This completely misses the purpose of the downvoting feature, which is not surprising, since upvoting seems no longer to indicate quality or truth of the comment neither.

> rust is this sort of equilibra that the world has reached for, especially security related projects

Which is amazing, since Rust only covers a fraction of safety/security concerns covered by Ada/SPARK. Of course this language has some legacy issues (e.g. the physical separation of interface and body in two separate files; we have better solutions today), but it is still in development and more robust than the C/C++ (and likely Rust) toolchain. And in the age of LLMs, robustness and features of a toolchain should matter more than the language syntax/semantics.

> Rust does seem to be good enough for this use case.

If you compare it to the very recend C++ implementations they are using, I tend to agree. But if you compare it to a much more mature technology like e.g. Ada, I have my doubts.

> If you compare it to the very recend C++ implementations they are using, I tend to agree. But if you compare it to a much more mature technology like e.g. Ada, I have my doubts.

I agree with you in the sense that it would've definitely been interesting to read what Andreas thinks of Ada/D and the discussion surrounding it and your overall comment too.

I do wish that anyone from ladybird team/maybe even Andreas if he's on HN (not sure) could respond to the original query if possible.

I remember ladybird had a discord server I once joined, perhaps someone from the community could ask Andreas about it there if possible since It would be genuinely fascinating to read.

Although a point I am worried about is if Ladybird changes the language again let's say after a discussion of using Ada/D. It might be awkward.

> I am worried about is if Ladybird changes the language again

In the time of good LLMs this is likely no longer a show-stopper (as e.g. the specific formating rules in C/C++ since there are good re-formating tools). The question is how long we will need programming languages at all. They were primarily invented because large assembler projects were too challenging for most people. But if all the complicated details can now be delegated to LLMs, strictly speaking, we no longer need programming languages either.

> This completely misses the purpose of the downvoting feature

"Downvote for disagree" has been canonicalized on HN since (nearly) the beginning, by pg himself, back when he used his real-name account to comment. :)

I agree that it has undesirable consequences, but it is fully established.

It's even worse than that. People are all too often willing to "flag for disagree". It's getting to be pretty common to see threads with comments that are [flagged][dead] which don't break the rules in any way, but merely express a view which is unpopular. Sometimes I even agree that it's a stupid position to take up, but that doesn't merit being flagged to death. I always vouch for those comments but it feels like an exercise in futility with so many people using the flag function as a "super fuck you" button.

Personally I would remove the downvote button entierly because apparently it is a lossy projection of an at least three-dimensional vector: agreement, quality, truth. Graying out text so it is no longer readable is a censoring measure not justified in most cases I encounter on HN in the eight years I'm here.

Based on the origins of Rust as a tool for writing the really thorny, defensive parsers of potentially actively hostile code for firefox, I have to imagine that another web browser is the most at-home place the language could ever be.

If this means we will get an independent state-of-the-art browser engine, I'm all for it.

IMV Servo is going to be the independent state of the art browser

I have my doubts it'll ever be "finished". Servo gives strong vibes of a project that will avoid performance hacks, because they're not nice/state of the art code. I have no evidence, it's just the energy I've picked up from it

My intuition is that they will convert to zig again when it stables. If it is possible to do it using LLM in 2 weeks for rust, then it would be the same for zig, too.

While rust is nice on paper, writting complex software in it is mentally consuming. You can not do it for a long time.

If they are looking for a memory-safe language, why would they convert to Zig?

If they do, it could be because safety is a gradient and one variable among many in software development, albeit a very important one when it comes to browsers.

Pardon my ignorance, but doesn't a byte-by-byte output recreation of the C++ code in Rust defeat the whole purpose of using Rust? For one, would it be idiomatic Rust anymore? Also, if there's a (non-memory related) vulnerability in the C++ code, would it be possible for that to be introduced in Rust too?

The impression I get from the article is not that the compiled code of each implementation produces the same object code, but that when the implementations are run with the same inputs, they produce exactly the same output — that is, the same JS VM bytecode.

That matches my understanding too.

If they had developed a technique to get a modern C++ compiler and rustc to generate exactly the same output for any program (even a trivial one) I think that would be huge news and I would love to see all the linker hacking that would involve.

I've looked at the code from the PR. It seems to use safe types and standard idioms like pattern matching, so at least at first glance it looks like Rust.

It could have been worse. C++ code naively converted line-by-line to Rust typically results in weird and unsafe Rust, but in this case it seems they've only been strict about the results being the same, not the structure of the implementation.

Rewrites have a very high risk of introducing regressions. Trying to fix bugs while rewriting will only make things harder, because instead of simply comparing outputs exactly, you'll have to judge which output is the right one. If you let the behavior significantly diverge during the rewrite, you'll just have two differently buggy codebases and no reference to follow.

It's much easier to make a bug-for-bug compatible copy, and fix bugs later.

Once you get a byte-by-byte duplicate, you can start refactoring into idiomatic Rust. Convert pointers to references, rip out unsafe blocks, and let Clippy go ham.

Add the fact that AI is writing the rust code...

Translating software that has a lot of tests is easy for LLMs. I think we'll be seeing a lot more of that in the next years. But it will take some time for people to build up more trust in these tools. Good test harnesses are a key enabler.

The inevitable cleanup that will follow this could be done the same way. Refactoring like that can be done in more bite sized chunks, which makes it easier to review what is happening and control how it is done.

If it is this easy, surely the trend is Rust output being an intermediate pass of the LLM super compiler. A security subset if you will (like other kinds of optimization), it will move from Rust specs to some deeper level of analysis and output the final executable. Some brave souls will read the intermediate Rust output (just like people used to read the assembler output from compilers) but the LLM super compiler will just translate a detailed English like spec into final executables.

Do you seriously think LLMs will not just spam unsafe blocks in it like they do with any task ever?

I'd generally be quite surprised to see LLMs spam unsafe blocks, both because that's behavior that I haven't observed while using them and because that contradicts my mental model of them where they imitate the styles of code that they were trained on (which in rust generally does not include spamming unsafe).

> 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 would make ladybird a lot less interested (at least to me).

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

Why isn't that enough?

Browsers are incredibly security-sensitive projects. Downloading untrusted code from the internet and executing is part of their intended functionality! If memory safety is needed anywhere it's in browsers.

Rust was pretty much created to help solve security issues in browsers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rust_(programming_language)#20...

> besides the obvious

Well, what else is there besides the obvious? It's a browser.

Even Chrome has started to adopt Rust due to recurring memory vulnerabilities.... that's a big enough reason.

You don't want a browser with a bunch of RCEs that can be triggered by opening a web page...

You do want a browser with RCE, but you want it to keep the it sandboxed. The hard part is executing the code safely

I guess you will need to wait for their Feb 2026 update.

"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?

Lot of DOM APIs are like that. You have methods like element.[parent|children]() which implies circular structure, and then you have APIs like element.click(), which emits a click event that bubbles through the DOM - which means that element has to have some mutable reference to the DOM state. Or even element.remove(), which seems like a super weird api to have on an element of a collection, from Rust API design point of view.

You can model these with reference counting, but this turned out unfeasible in browsers. There's a great talk from when Blink (Chrome) transitioned from reference counting to GC, which provides a lot more details about these problems in practice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uxmEyd6uxo

> I'd get it if they were writing the UI in this, but the rest of this post is about the JS engine.

I think this might be the reason they started with the JS engine and not with some more fundamental browser structures. JS object model has these problems, too, but the engine has to solve them in more generic way. All JS objects can just be modeled as some JSObject class/struct where this is handled on the engine level.

DOM and other browser structures are different because the engine has to understand them, so the browser developers have to interact with the GC manually and if you watch the talk above, you'll see that it's quite involved to do even in C++, let alone in Rust, which puts a bunch of restrictions on top of that.

Any word on how much more memory safe the implementation is? If passing a previous test suite is the criteria for success, what has changed, really? Are there previous memory safety tests that went from failing to passing?

I am very interested to know if this time and energy spent actually improved memory safety.

Other engineers facing the same challenges want to know!

If the previous impl had known memory safety issues I'd imagine they'd fix them as a matter of priority. It's hard to test for memory safety issues you don't know about.

On the rust side, the question is how much `unsafe` they used (I would hope none at all, although they don't specify).

You can look: https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird/pull/8104/files?...

It seems like it is used mostly for FFI.

It is entirely possible a Rust port could have caught previously unknown memory safety issues. Furthermore, a Rust port that looks and feels like C++ may be peppered with unsafe calls to the point where the ROI on the port is greatly reduced.

I am not trying to dunk on the effort; quite the contrary. I am eager to hear more about the goals it originally set out to achieve.

None at all, the generated AST and bytecode are stated to be identical

This is really YOLOing as the original author doesn't know Rust well so what happens if they hit some complex production issue LLM aren't aware of? Hiring an expensive consultant to fix that until the next LLM iteration?

I'm as anti LLM use as they come, but this appears to be migrating libraries from already funcitoning C++ code. In the case of your hypothetical I suspect the course of action will be "shelve this library port until someone with domain expertise and Rust experience can look at it". Its not like he chucked the whole codebase at the GenaI gods and said "Port it to Rust!".

> what happens if they hit some complex production issue

they learn Rust

it takes a couple of years

it's not that hard.

Do we know what was the problem with the C++ version in the first place ? Why not keep it as is ?

Good step. It will bring many more contributors.

Using LibJS with servo, when?

That's a pivot, iirc they wanted to swift (I'm very glad they didn't do that). It's cool to see something like claude be useful for large scale projects like that

Interesting in context of that some time ago Andreas said that they failed on porting TypeScript compiler from TypeScript itself to Go lang by using LLMs and they went with manual port https://youtu.be/uMqx8NNT4xY?si=Vf1PyNkg3t6tmiPp&t=1423

How is this approach better than letting claude or some AI catch memory bugs better than humans in the c++ code itself?

Given it's not launched and it's donor driven, I guess conserving developer time is a key priority? Dual track sucks lots of time?

This byte for byte output is the right way to go. But it depends on test cases. Hope the amount of cases cover all possible combination of input

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!

By 'Rust compiler' and 'C++ compiler', they refer to the LibJS bytecode generator implemented in those languages. This is about the generated JS bytecode.

Yes, I re-read again, and I think you are correct. Thanks!

Thanks! I was confused about this as well.

They're referring to LibJS's bytecode (the internal instruction stream of Ladybird’s JS engine), not to Rust/CPP output formats.

I wonder what is gained by this port though, if the C++ codebase already employed modern approaches to memory management. It's entirely possible that the Rust version will perform worse too as compilers are less mature.

"modern approaches to memory management" aren't enough for complete memory safety.

Maybe, but it's certainly possible to write memory safe code in C++. It may be more or less difficult, but it isn't typically the ONLY objective of a project. C++ has other advantages too, such as seamless integration with C APIs and codebases, idiomatic OOP, and very mature compilers and libraries.

Something of a culture clash here ain’t it, albeit an imbalanced one.

This may sound stupid, but I wonder if using GPUI for a web browser could have some performance benefits...

I don't get the impression they care that much about performance. Besides, it would limit the number of platforms it could run on if it requires a recent GPU.

Using Rust means they’ve limited the number of platforms already… so I doubt they care.

Didn't they already switched from one language to another ?

Oooh noooo I will have to fork it before it is too late!

This will be another bad decision just like with Swift. From what I heard, Rust is notoriously bad at letting people define their own structure and instead beats you up until you satisfy the borrow checker. I think it'll make development slow and unpleasant. There are people out there who enjoy that, but it's not a fit for when you need to deliver a really huge codebase in reasonable time. I remember Andreas mentioning he just wanted something like C++, but with a GC and D would be absolutely perfect for this job.

Maybe, but will they have to fight with borrow checker for doing some other than (the very OOP) DOM components? They'll obviously use both for a long time in the future, so more functional places can get Rust, while more OOP places can benefit from C++

Nobody uses D

This is like the "real world" argument. Nobody uses that "in the real world", except well people that do.

Well, I do!?!! It's even faster than zoomer langs like Odin. You should try it.

Zoomer is a good word btw. I love zoomers.

And? Does it work? Because it does. It's a lot closer to C++ and you literally need like a week to start being productive and it's insanely flexible as a language. Nobody uses Swift also, but the additional problem with Swift was that it's entirely Apple-centric.

> Nobody uses Swift also

Yep, it was also a weird, not entirely pragmatic choice, even if it was well justified technically and all-in-all rational. D would be the same.

Entirely Apple-centric?

Were there any immediate benefits of this conversion, e.g. reduced memory use or lower CPU utilization?

Likely the opposite, as safe Rust has some extra safety checks for things like array bounds.

Fuck me. This is wild. Sorry for the potty mouth.

    > Porting LibJS
    > Our first target was LibJS , Ladybird’s JavaScript engine. The lexer, parser, AST, and bytecode generator are relatively self-contained and have extensive test coverage through test262, which made them a natural starting point.

    > Results
    > The requirement from the start was byte-for-byte identical output from both pipelines. The result was about 25,000 lines of Rust, and the entire port took about two weeks. The same work would have taken me multiple months to do by hand.

How long until Ladybird begins to impact market dominance for Chrome and Firefox? My guess: Two years.

Note that Firefox doesn't have market dominance. It is under 5% market share. That said I imagine Firefox users to be the most likely to make the jump. However, the web is a minefield of corner cases. It's hard to believe it will be enough to make the browser largely useful enough to be a daily driver.

Why do you think Firefox users would be most likely to make the jump? The main reason I see people give for supporting Ladybird is challenging the dominance of the incumbents. That's not really a great reason to switch from Firefox because, as you note, it doesn't have any dominance. And there's also an argument that splitting the non-Chrome market into two only increases Chrome's dominance.

From what I can tell from HN, Brave seems to be popular with those users who hate Google but for whatever reason hate Mozilla even more, and I suspect those will be the most likely users to switch.

Arguably anyone not using Chrome, safari or edge is the most likely to try Ladybird.

Would rather use Servo. Atleast it has downloadable binaries.

This is sort of hilarious if you think about it. The Firefox browser is completely written in Rust. Now Ladybird is a "human-directed ai" Rust browser. Makes you wonder how much of the code the two browsers will share going forward given llm assisted autocompletes will pull from the same Rust Browser dataset.

Probably not much: the requirement is exact equivalence of program inputs to outputs, and as such the agents are performing very mechanical translation from the existing C++ code to Rust. Their prompts aren't "implement X browser component in rust", they're "translate this C++ code to Rust, with these extra details that you can't glean from the code itself."

It's like only 10% of Firefox is rust.

I wonder where did you get the idea that Firefox was all Rust. Made me curious.

Only a small portion of Firefox is written in Rust. Apparently some of the most performant and least buggy parts are those in Rust, but again, only parts like the CSS engine.

https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox Rust isn't even mentioned in languages used.

I don’t think I want to use a vibe-coded browser, unless “human-directed” just means that a human coded it and asked clarifying questions to the AI.

I don't get it, and I don't have a dog in the C/C++ vs. Rust race. Ladybird has ~1200 contributors with a predominance of C++ contributions, followed by HTML, and with "other" lying at 0.5%.

That's a lot of people contributing.

How many of them will be less willing to contribute in the future, and less productive when they do if a sizable portion is in Rust? Maybe there'll be more contributions and maybe there'll be less. I don't know. If you've managed to develop a community of 1200 developers who are willing to advance the project why upset the applecart?

There is a flock of people yelling around that they'd contribute if it was Rust, but won't touch C++

Great! I can't wait they totally ditch C++

I guess the ETA will pushed back by a few years then?

By 2 weeks so far ;-)

Probably not unless using Rust present some particular challenge for this type of project. But having eaten this proverbial apple they would probably use AI more and more assuming they have a budget and in this case being less rich than C++ might not mean much for productivity

This is great! I'm very excited about Ladybird. My current browser, Brave, is the best of the worst but Ladybird is the best of the best. On another note, I'm hoping iOS will eventually let go of their control over WebKit, however wishful it might be.

A lot of the interest in Ladybird and its parent project, SerenityOS, stemmed from the bespoke, "from scratch" approach Andreas advocated. If they're going to start vibe-coding everything, then what's the point of the top-to-bottom wheel reinvention they're doing? E.g., why even bother maintaining their own, custom XML parser instead of using any of the multitude that already exist (including in Rust) if they're ultimately going to lean heavily on AI in the course of developing it, since that inherently involves laundering existing implementations?

This project, of all of them, throwing in the towel on AI makes me fear AI abstainers have no future.

Guess it will never come out.

For those unaware: the author holds some very unfriendly views. https://drewdevault.com/2025/09/24/2025-09-24-Cloudflare-and...

What are Rust programmers to do now that LLMs can port code to Rust??

It reads like a joke without a punchline

Rejoice?

They are lost. C & C++ are absolutely fine.

Cool!

I've translated it from Rust to V in 45 minutes. Works great:

https://github.com/medvednikov/libjs_v

Compiles in 0.2 seconds on my M5 (compared to Rust's 3.3 seconds).

Rust is perfect. Too perfect for the fascists behind Ladybird. https://drewdevault.com/2025/09/24/2025-09-24-Cloudflare-and...

Leave Rust for the non-fascists.

I'm still glad that NetSurf exists.

I wouldn't mind if one result of this was a writeup on what patterns/antipatterns are there when converting code and concepts that used to be very aligned with C++-style OOP, deep inheritance and all that jazz, to what feels natural in Rust, and how you can rephrase those concepts without loss in the substance of what you need to do.

I guess it's a long way off, since the LLM translation would need to be refactored into natural Rust first. But the value of it would be in that it's a real world project, and not a hypothetical "well, you could probably just...".

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.

> Soon it will do everything better and faster than me

There is no evidence of that coming from this post. The work was highly directly by an extremely skilled engineer. As he points out, it was small chunks. What chunks and in what order were his decision.

Is AI re-writing those chunks much faster than he could. Yes. Very much so. Is it doing it better? Probably not. So, it is mostly just faster when you are very specific about what it should do. In other words, it is not a competitor. It is a tool.

And the entire thing was constrained by a massive test suite. AI did not write that. It does not even understand why those tests are the way they are.

This is a long way from "AI, write me a JavaScript engine".

Id put it as a example of a carpenter preparing their material with a lathe and circular saw vs one working with a handsaw and chisel.

Both will get a skilled craftsman to the point where thie output is a quality piece of work. Using the autotoools to prepare the inputs allows velocity and consistency.

Main issue is the hype and skiddies who would say - feed this tree into a machine and get a cabinet.Producing non-detrministic outputs with the operator being unable to adjust requirements on the fly or even stray from patterns/designs that havent been trained yet.

The tools have limitiations and the operators as well , and the hype does adisservice to what would be establishing reasonable patterns of usage and best practices.

Is a migration from language X to Y or refactoring from pattern A to B really the kind of task that makes you look forward to your day when you wake up?

Personally my sweet spot for LLM usage is for such tasks, and they can do a much better job unpacking the prompt and getting it done quickly.

In fact, there's a few codebases at my workplace that are quite shit, and I'm looking forward to make my proposal to refactor these. Prior to LLMs, I'm sure I'd have been laughed off, but now it's much more practical to achieve this.

Right. I had a 100% manual hobby project that did a load of parametric CAD in Python. The problem with sharing this was either actively running a server, trying to port the stack to emscripten including OCCT, or rewriting in JS, something I am only vaguely experienced in.

In ~5 hours of prompting, coding, testing, tweaking, the STL outputs are 1:1 (having the original is essential for this) and it runs entirely locally once the browser has loaded.

I don’t pretend that I’m a frontend developer now but it’s the sort of thing that would have taken me at least days, probably longer if I took the time to learn how each piece worked/fitted together.

It's the opposite for me, most of the time it's first rough pass it generates is awful and if you don't have good taste and a solid background of years of experience programming you won't notice it and I keep having to tell it to steer into better design choices.

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.

Agreed, however, I'm quite sure 25,000 lines translated in "multiple months" is very "slow", for a naive translation between languages as similar as C++ and Rust.

2000+ lines/day chunks are 10 days for 20+k lines...

I'm aware. What I meant is this is a reasonable output for a 1:1 translation by hand, without LLM use.

2000 lines a day feels like a lot to me if you want to be thorough.

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

Helps me.