126
Ladybird Browser adopts Rust, with help from AI (ladybird.org)
submitted 8 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
85 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Lobsters.

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 2 points 8 months ago (1 child)

There's no reason to believe it's mostly unsafe. And even if that's the case, changing from unsafe rust to safe is less of a leap than cpp to rust.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
    •
  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago*

    Having done some C to rust auto-translation some time ago, it definitely was wildly unsafe. Maybe it's better now, but there is no reason to assume it's mostly safe now either. Even recently I did some regular vibe coding to test it out, and it generated some very questionable code.

    Even if there is zero "unsafe", there could be loads of unchecked array accesses, or unwraps causing panics, which while "safe", will cause crashes.

    Fixing unsafe can be a mixed bag, some will be easy, some will require much deeper changes. And without looking at the code, impossible to say which it will be.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent