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.

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!

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).

Were there any immediate benefits of this conversion, e.g. reduced memory use or lower CPU utilization?

Something of a culture clash here ain’t it, albeit an imbalanced one.

Oooh noooo I will have to fork it before it is too late!

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.

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.

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.

I'm not here to troll the LLM-as-programmer haters, but Ladybird (and Rust!) is loved by HN, and this is a big win.

How long until Ladybird begins to impact market dominance for Chrome and Firefox? My guess: Two years.

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?