[samiv]

This is the famous trap that Joel on Software talked about in a blog post long time ago.

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.

[christophilus]

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.

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.

[throwaway2037]

    > 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.

HN nerd-snipe alert! OK, you got me good. Can you share some battle stories? I have also been part of rewrites in my career, but my experience is mixed. I'm not here to simple brush away your experience; I want to know more about why you think (in retrospective) it was a good idea and why it was successful.

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.)

[abuyalip]

I still don’t buy this “safer more modern” mentality. Modern C++ pretty much solves the safety issues. People need to learn how to use tools properly.

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.

[samiv]

The good news is as of now ladyboy doesn't have any competition.

Rarely if ever is anything able to compete simply by being "better". As far as USPs go it's just not enough. I reckon for ladyboy the USP (if any) is going to be it being open and NOT chrome (or derivative). So "safe" "modern" language is not going to mean much to the end users.

[simonw]

Nearly 26 years ago! https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

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.

[oblio]

He's still right if you don't have good automated testing and you lost most of the original developers (or you don't have other seniors ceva familiar with the domain).

[ignoramous]

> What's different today really is the LLMs and coding agents.

In Ladybird's case, tests they could rely upon.

[JumpCrisscross]

> then these two teams are essentially in a race against each other and the port will likely never catch up

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.”

[safercplusplus]

And I might suggest that there's the possibility that the C++ code could end up being more cleanly ported to a memory-safe subset of C++. plug: https://github.com/duneroadrunner/scpptool/blob/master/appro...

[raincole]

The context matters when we talk about Joel's article[0].

It's about Netscape. By the time, Netscape had dominated the browser market. It was the leader and that means they had all the market share to lose. You can bet Microsoft's decision makers were very closely monitoring what those at Netscape were doing.

Today, practically nobody uses Ladybird. No one even knows it[1]. It's so behind and has nothing to lose. If you really want to rewrite, it's better to do it when you have nothing to lose.

[0]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

[1]: to quote Joel, "no one" means less than one million people.