alt Hacker News> We know the result isn’t idiomatic Rust, and there’s a lot that can be simplified once we’re comfortable retiring the C++ pipeline. That cleanup will come in time.
Correct me if I’m wrong since I don’t know these two languages, but like some other languages, doing things the idiomatic way could be dramatically different. Is “cleanup” doing a lot of heavy lifting here? Could that also mean another complete rewrite from scratch?
A startup switching languages after years of development is usually a big red flag. “We are rewriting it in X” posts always preceded “We are shutting down”. I wish them luck though!
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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.
Spending weeks porting (presumably) working code with LLM is a bit strange
> A startup switching languages after years of development is usually a big red flag.
Startups are not a good comparison here. They have a different relationship with code than software projects.
Linux has rewriten entire stacks over and over again.
The PHP engine was rewritten completely at least twice.
The musl libc had entire components rewritten basically from scratch and later integrated.
Exactly my thought! I guess I'll keep Firefox for the foreseeable future...
A mitigating factor in this case is the C++ and Rust are both multi-paradigm languages. You can quite reasonably represent most C++ patterns in Rust, even if it might not be quite how you'd write Rust in the first place.