this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2026
91 points (77.6% liked)
Technology
81803 readers
4375 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Why it wouldn't be? Surely not having idiomatic rust doesn't eliminate other benefits of switching to the language, like better tooling, memory safety, and perhaps more people willing to contribute. Over time the codebase can be improved but the main goal in the transition seems to not break existing functionality, which they seem to have accomplished for LibJS.
I haven't looked at the code, but the mem safety may be out if the translation just slapped unsafe and transmute everywhere.
And "working code" is often very hard to replace, it can be hard to justify code changes when the original "works just the same". So, I would expect the weird ported code to live on unless there is a major effort to rewrite it.
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.
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.
I don't think "why not" is a great response in general - especially when the same developer also invested time in Swift that was ultimately wasted.
It's not a why not response. I'm asking back why do you think it wouldn't be worth it even as a literal translation from C++, because in my view, that would be a first step towards a proper Rust port, and it still brings benefits to the table.