alt Hacker NewsIf I were Google I'd try to rewrite Chromium in Rust. The FFMPEG folks should try porting the whole codebase to Rust too. They can always keep the legacy versions for legacy computers (my old n270 netbook can barely play 720p@30FPS anyway, and it's too slow to downsize 4k video to 720 or 480p...), so a bigger amd64 machine will always be -reallistically- needed for anything else than <=720p consumption.
Replies
nkjoep • yesterday at 7:54 PM
What folks at Ladybird did this year. Started adopting rust for part if not all their engine.
> The FFMPEG folks should try porting the whole codebase to Rust too.
They don’t seem convinced that that would be a meaningful use of time for them. (2025)
https://itsfoss.com/news/ffmpeg-swipe-at-rust/
And 6 months ago someone did a little experiment using Claude to rewrite FFmpeg in Rust. It was by the own description by the person that had the AI do it, significantly slower than FFmpeg even when incorporating assembly code from FFmpeg.
https://github.com/sharifhsn/wedeo
Maybe with further advancements it is now possible to get a better result, or soon.
But if you are going to copy their assembly code into the Rust protect how do you definitively prove that no memory unsafe operations are happening in those parts? Seems to me that either the whole thing should be safe Rust, if the point of the rewrite is memory safety.