One of the biggest point of rewriting is you know better by then so you create something better.

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.

> Copy pasting from one language to another is way worse than complete rewrite with actual idiomatic and useful code.

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.

These are two different kinds of rewrites, for two different kinds of codebases, in two different situations. The important thing is to know which kind of rewrite you're doing, and have the whole team onboard.

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.

It depends on your goals. If your only initial goal is to ensure the safety of your code, and that is rather important for a browser!