Ladybird adopts Rust

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

I am unsure if I can rationally justify saying this, but I am left with disappointment and unease. Comparable to when a series I care about changes showrunner and jumps the shark.

Chatbot-translated code which is C++ foisted onto Rust? I will respectfully roll my eyes.

Ah, but I see they actually haven't done that to most of their code, so maybe it's just a bit of pandering to the hype and fashion.

I feel similar about the potential of this technique and have heard this from other C++ developers too.

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.

i rememebr seeing interviews saying rust is not suited for this project because of recursion and dom tree. how they tested multiple languages and settled on swift. then they abandon swift and now they shift towards rust.

this entire project starts to look like "how am i feeling today?" rather than a serious project.

Some time ago I was perma-banned from the Ladybird github repository. One can say it is warranted, or not (people have their own opinion; I completely disagree with their decision). Now that this has happened, I can speak more freely about Ladybird.

Naturally this will be somewhat critical, but I need to first put things into context. I do believe that we really need an alternative to Google dominating our digital life. So I don't object that we need alternatives; whether Ladybird will be an alternative, or not, will be shown in the future. Most assuredly we need competition as otherwise the Google empire moves forward like Darth Vader and the empire (but nowhere near as cool as that; I find Google boring and lame. Even skynet in Terminator was more fun than Google. Google just annoys the heck out of me, but back to the topic of browsers).

So with that out of the way ... Ladybird is kind of ... erratic.

Some time ago, perhaps two months or three, Andreas suddenly announced "Swift WILL BE THE FOREVER FUTURE! C++ sucks!!!". People back then were scratching heads. It was not clear why Swift is suddenly our saviour.

Ok, now we learn - "wait ... swift is NOT the future, but RUST is!!!". Ok ... more head-scratching. We are having a deja-vu moment here... but it gets stranger:

"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."

and then:

"I used Claude Code and Codex for the translation. This was human-directed, not autonomous code generation"

So ... the expertise will be with regards to ... relying on AI to autogenerate code in ... Rust.

I am not saying this is a 100% fail strategy, mind you. AI can generate useful code, we could see that. But I am beginning to have more and more doubts about the Ladybird project. Add to this the breakage of URLs that are used by thousands or million people world-wide (see the issues reported on the github tracker); or also the fact that, once you scale-up and more and more people use ladybird, will you be able to keep up with issue trackers? Will you ban more people?

In a way it is actually good that I am no longer allowed to make comments on their repository because I can now be a lot more critical and ask questions that the ladybird team will have to evaluate. Will ladybird blend? Will it succeed? Will it fail? Yes, it is way too early to make an evaluation, so we should evaluate in some months or so, perhaps end of this year. But I am pretty certain the criticism will increase, at the least the moment they decide to leave beta (or alpha or whatever model they use; they claimd they want a first working version in this year for Linux users, let's see whether that works).

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10x programmers become 100x with the power of AI. Not an unexpected outcome. But the world is going to suck for ordinary people. 10x programmers will gladly embrace this future become it empowers them more.

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.

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Completely ignoring the Rust aspect, I’m disappointed that two weeks were spent on something that isn’t getting Ladybird to a state where it can be used as a daily driver. Ladybird isn’t usable right now, and if it was usable, improving the memory safety would be a commendable goal. Right now I just feel like this is premature.

ÄNTLIGEN!

developers with good taste like Andreas Kling will be able to design entire OSes with coding agents

Cool project, but I'm a bit curious hearing how the rest of the project feels about this?

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).