> Way too many rewrites fail because people try to "improve" things during the port
I think the last one gets ignored easily but my favorite time to document code is when reading it (but the best time is when writing it). It forces you to think explicitly about what the code is doing and makes it harder for the little things to slip by. Given that Ladybird is a popular project I really do think good documentation is a way to accelerate its development. Good documentation means new people can come in and contribute faster and with fewer errors. It lowers the barrier to entry, substantially. It's also helpful for all the mere mortals who forget things
This is a HUUUGE reason code written in rust tended to be so much better than the original (which was probably written in c++).
Human expertise is the single most important factor and is more important than language.
Copy pasting from one language to another is way worse than complete rewrite with actual idiomatic and useful code.
Best option after proper rewrite is binding. And copy-paste with LLM comes way below these options imo.
If you look at real world, basically all value is created by boring and hated languages. Because people spent so much effort on making those languages useful, and other people spent so much effort learning and using those languages.
Don’t think anyone would prefer to work in a rust codebase that an LLM copy-pasted from c++, compared to working on a c++ codebase written by actual people that they can interact with.
But translating with automated tools is a much faster experiment.
Sometimes (not always), rewriting from scratch ends up in a big loss of time and resources and never replaces the old version.
The sort of rewrite you're talking about can work well at an early stage of a project, in the spirit of Fred Brooks's "plan to throw one away". But for a mature browser like Ladybird that's trying to not break the user experience, it's much better to have a pure translation step, and then try to improve or refactor it later.