> 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.
Note that Firefox doesn't have market dominance. It is under 5% market share. That said I imagine Firefox users to be the most likely to make the jump. However, the web is a minefield of corner cases. It's hard to believe it will be enough to make the browser largely useful enough to be a daily driver.
Why do you think Firefox users would be most likely to make the jump? The main reason I see people give for supporting Ladybird is challenging the dominance of the incumbents. That's not really a great reason to switch from Firefox because, as you note, it doesn't have any dominance. And there's also an argument that splitting the non-Chrome market into two only increases Chrome's dominance.
From what I can tell from HN, Brave seems to be popular with those users who hate Google but for whatever reason hate Mozilla even more, and I suspect those will be the most likely users to switch.
How long until Ladybird begins to impact market dominance for Chrome and Firefox? My guess: Two years.