This is the way. Coding assistants are also really great at porting from one language to the other, especially if you have existing tests.
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.
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!
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.
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).
I honestly can't tell if this is a humorous attack or not.
Poe's law is validated once again.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
No that’s a stretch, but firing up a AAA game.
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 :-)
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.
Same thing.
(or generally: “Is the cocaine cartel comparison fair or unfair?”)
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?
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!
>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> 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.
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.
Though if apocalypse happens and all of our built tech goes away, we are in for a serious survival issu.
"Bicycle for the mind", as always when it involves Jobs, sounds more fitting for the masses though, so thanks for sharing that :)
(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
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 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.
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".
This link also has a comparison to Skills further down.
https://code.claude.com/docs/en/output-styles#built-in-outpu...
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.
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.
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.
The difference now is they can get much further along.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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..
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.
All my vibe coded projects are human directed, unless explicitly stated otherwise
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
And experience doesn't equal correct decision making. People just get traumatized in different ways.
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.
A release (?)
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.
if it works it works i guess, but it seems mad to me on the surface
> ... the entire port took about two weeks.
So he was ~halfway in when he made the Swift announcement.
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.
Wary of what?
Long read on the topic (quite funny, covers Cluely): https://harpers.org/archive/2026/03/childs-play-sam-kriss-ai...
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)
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.
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.
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.
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...
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?
it is totally possible to use some strict subset of C++, which will be memory safe.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.)
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.
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.
Maybe we would see similar effects adopting Modern C++. Maybe not. The article doesn't tell us.
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.
[1]: https://developer.chrome.com/blog/memory-safety-fonts
[2]: https://github.com/googlefonts/fontations/tree/main/skrifa
What does the memory safety even matter when hackers poison heavily used crates?
"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?
The data says otherwise, three overflows and two UAFs this month in Chrome alone: https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-1224...
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.
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)
- 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.
Not quite. It doesn't have tagged unions, which is what I expect you are thinking of, but it does have sum types.
> People need to learn how to use tools properly.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
the hard bit (borrow checker) has still to be done...
Testing has become 10x as important as ever.
I am already using low code tooling with agents for some projects, in iPaaS products.
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.
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.
I see the opposite. New languages have more difficulty breaking into popularity due to lack of enough existing codename and ecosystems.
IMO Rust will strike a very strong balance here for LLMs.
Hardly much different than dealing with traditional offshoring projects output.
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.
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.
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.
I wonder what kind of tech debt this brings and if the trade off will be worth whatever problems they were having with C++.
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.
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?
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
They're not porting the browser itself to Rust, for the record.
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.
“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/
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.
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.
> Ralph Wiggum loop
https://github.com/anthropics/claude-plugins-official/pull/1...
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 puts zero resources into making that claim reality, however.
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.
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.
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™
There is an open PR (by simonw btw): https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented/pull/4...
> classic HackerNews title shortening algorithm
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 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
Its purpose is not to reinvent everything. It’s not a hype project.
Attackers are surprisingly resilient to partial security.
But Rust doesn't have C++ interop at all?
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)
Yeah but, you can do the same in 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.
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.
for example: "Swift fails to import clang modules with #include <math.h> with libstdc++-15 installed. Workaround: None (!!)"
[1]: https://www.swift.org/documentation/cxx-interop/
[2]: https://www.swift.org/blog/improving-usability-of-c-librarie...
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).
While rust is nice on paper, writting complex software in it is mentally consuming. You can not do it for a long time.
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.
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.
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 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
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.
"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.
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.
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.
I'm not sure how I'd feel if I woke up and found a system I worked on had been translated into an another language I'm not neccessarily familiar with. And I'm not sure I'd want to fix an non-idiomatic "mess" just because it's been translated into a language I'm familiar with either (although I suspect they'll have no problem attracting rust developers).
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).
Why isn't that enough?
Well, what else is there besides the obvious? It's a browser.
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!
On the rust side, the question is how much `unsafe` they used (I would hope none at all, although they don't specify).
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.
It seems like it is used mostly for FFI.
> 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.
EDIT: bramhaag pointed out the error of my ways. Thanks bramhaag!
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.
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...".
Rust syntax is a PITA and investing a lot of effort in the language doesn’t seem worth the trouble for an experienced C++ developer, but with AI learning, porting and maintenance all become more accessible. It’s possible to integrate Rust in an existing codebase or write subparts of larger C++ projects in Rust where it makes sense.
I was recently involved in an AI porting effort, but using different languages and the results were fine. Validating and reviewing the code took longer than writing it.
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.
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.
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.
Helps me.
In the hands of experienced devs, AI increases coding speed with minimal impact to quality. That's your differentiator.
Would be as bad as being in a cult.
I'm no mind reader, and certainly no anthropologist, but I suspect that what separates humans from other (non extinct) animals, is that we compulsively seek caves that we can decorate with moving shadows and static symbols. We even found a series of prime numbers (sequences of dots, ". ... ..... .......") in a cave from the _ice age_. Mathematics before writing. We seek to project what we see with our mind's eye into the world itself, thereby making it communicable, shareable. Ever tell someone you had a dream, and they believed you? You just planted the seed for a cult, a shared cave. Even though you cannot photograph the dream, or offer any evidence that you can dream at all.
The industrial and scientific revolutions have distanced our consciousness from this idea, even as they enabled ever more perfect caves to manifest. Our vocabulary has become corrupted and unclear. We started using words like "reality", and "literally", and "truth", when we mean the exact opposite.
The conspiracy theorists and cultists, are just people who wandered into a new cave, with a different kind of fire, and differently curved walls, and they want to tell people from their old cave that they have found a way out of the cave into reality -- they do not yet realize (or do not want to accept), that they live in a network of caves, a network of different things in the same category.
During the early 2020s, we did a lot of talking about the disappearance of "consensus reality". This is scientific terminology mapped over the idea of caves and cults. You can tell, because the phrase is an oxymoron. It is not reality, if it requires consensus. It is fantasy, it is fiction, it is a dream. The cave has indeed become so widespread that we even _call_ it reality.
If you speak language, and read words, you are participating in a cult (we even call caves that had a kind of altar in the center a cult -- in Eurasia, there was a cave-cult called _the cult of the bear_, which had a bear skull placed in its center during the last ice age, and I would not be surprised if people spoke to it, with the help of hallucinogens). The only question is whether the cult is nourishing you or cannibalizing you.
To the person you are responding to (user ocd): your cave (ladybird, your hypothetical tv-series), no longer nourishes you like it once did. Maybe find a new cave, build a fire in it. Unlike a television series, you can fork a code base. You make it into the perfect cave, just for you. And if another person likes this cave, chooses to sit by the fire with you, well, now you have a cult.
this entire project starts to look like "how am i feeling today?" rather than a serious project.
So far this is the first and only shift
> The browser and libraries are all written in C++. (While our own memory-safe Jakt language is in heavy development, it’s not yet ready for use in Ladybird.)
https://awesomekling.github.io/Ladybird-a-new-cross-platform...
only thing I could find - has it been actually used in Ladybird after all?
Now a core part of the browser rendering engine is not something they’re going to outsource because it would defeat the goal of the project, but they have a far different policy to dependencies now than it used to before.
Secondly, Ladybird wants to be a fourth implementor in the web browsers we have today. Right now there's pretty much three browser engines: Blink, Gecko and WebKit (or alternatively, every browser is either Chrome, Firefox or Safari). Ladybird wants to be the fourth engine and browser in that list.
Servo also wants to be the fourth engine in that list, although the original goal was to remove Gecko and replace it with Servo (which effectively wouldn't change the fact there's only three browsers/three engines). Then Mozilla lost track of what it was doing[0] and discarded the entire Servo team. Nowadays Servo isn't part of Mozilla anymore, but they're clearly much more strapped for resources and don't seem to be too interested in setting up all the work to make a Servo-based browser.
The question of "why not use Servo" kinda has the same tone as "why are people contributing to BSD, can't they just use Linux?". It's a different tool that happens to be in the same category.
[0]: Or in a less positive sense, went evil.
Notably Servo doesn't have it's own JS engine at all. It uses Rust bindings to SpiderMonkey.
We have to accept this reality and act accordingly.
Yes you will downvote me. I have accepted this reality and will hack on my own projects in the woods or in a cave, on my own terms.
------ I wrote the following after a bit of thought:
It was with a heavy heart that I learned that the author of "Ladybird Browser" managed to convert the JavaScript compiler from C++ to Rush in 2 weeks, with the help of AI. It was a mix of awe and depression. 10x programmers leveraged AI to achieve a great feat in only 2 weeks, passing all tests. This was not a surprise to me as we all saw the writing on the wall a couple of years ago, but reality hit hard still. I'm a very average programmer, a very average person, and perhaps worse than the median in many perspectives. The gap between an ordinary people, with a 10X whatever, is getting much larger due to the evolution of tools. No, I do not believe AI can ever replace humans completely, at least not in the near future. But the point is, we the ordinary people are getting less and less relevant. The gate of professional work, the gate from which we drink satisfaction by knowing that many are using our work, is closing. I have no ill feeling towards any 10X programmers who is enjoying this. They are much better than me. They have earned it. They deserve it. And I deserve it, too, to have allowed myself to be mediocre. Being mediocre is a lesser evil then and now, but is a major sin in the future.
I soaked myself in "Crypto-zoologist" (Disco Elysium) to savor the moment. It is fine. Perhaps I will never get a professional job as a system programmer, and this is fine. I'll go into the woods, stay in a cave, and hack on my own projects, on my own terms. I do no care about the end products, and neither do I care whether people use them at all. Programming is a ritual to dispel the daemons from my soul, and I must keep doing it, until the last moment.
They ported an existing project from CPP to Rust using AI because the porting would've been too tedious. I don't think they're planning on vibe coding PRs the way you're imagining.
God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.
(courage to change the things I can;):- I think that this line must've given Andreas the strength, the passion to make the project reality.
but if AI made the change. Would the line be changed to courage to prompt an all powerful entity to change the things I asked it to.
Would that give courage? Would that inspire confidence in oneself?
I have personally made many projects with LLM's (honestly I must admit that I am a teenager and so I have been sort of using it from the start)
and personally, I feel like there are some points of curiosity that I can be prideful of in my projects but there is still a sense of emptiness and I think I am not the only one who observes it as such.
I think in the world of AI hype, it takes true courage & passion to write by hand.
Obviously one tries to argue that AI is the next bytecode but that is false because of the non deterministic nature of AI but even that being said, I think I personally feel as if the people who write assembly are definitely likely to be more passionate of their craft than Nodejs (and I would consider myself a nodejs guy and there's still passion but still)
Coding was definitely a form of art/expression/sense-of-meaning for Mr Andreas during a time of struggle. To automate that might strip him of the joy derived from stroking brush on an empty canvas.
Honestly, I really don't know about AI the more I think about it so I will not pretend that I know a thing/two about AI. This message is just my opinion in the moment. Opinions change with time but my opinion right now is that coding by hand definitely is more meaningful than not if the purpose of the project is to derive meaning.