Project ditches Swift and translates C++ with LLM assistance

The independent Ladybird web browser project is changing course on its choice of programming languages, with LLM-based coding assistants helping to evaluate the shift.

The latest blog post from the project spells out what's happening in its title: "Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI." The post also blames a delay in its development of around a year on its attempts to use Apple's Swift programming language, and one of its GitHub issues says that's history. For now, work continues in C++, with a side project porting subsystems to Rust running in parallel.

The Ladybird project is writing a modern web browser, including its rendering engine, from scratch. That's a big undertaking; there are very few such projects around. Aside from some niche tools, all mainstream browsers boil down to three basic families. Mozilla's Firefox, based on Mozilla's own Gecko rendering engine is one ...