alt Hacker NewsI built an agent with Go for the exact reasons laid out in the article, but did consider Rust. I would prefer it to be Rust actually. But the #1 reason I chose Go is token efficiency. My intuitive sense was that the LLM would have to spent a lot of time reasoning about lifetimes, interpreting and fixing compiler warnings, etc.
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"LLM would have to spend a lot of time reasoning about lifetimes"
Let's set aside the fact that Go is a garbage collected language while Rust is not for now...
Do you prefer to let LLM reason about lifetimes, or debugging subtle errors yourself at runtime, like what happens with C++?
People who are familiar with the C++ safety discussion understand that lifetimes are like types -- they are part of the code and are just as important as the real logic. You cannot be ambiguous about lifetimes yet be crystal clear about the program's intended behavior.
It's not a waste of time though. Those warnings and clippy lints are there to improve the quality of the code and to find bugs.
As a human I can just decide to write quality code (or not!), but LLMs don't understand when they're being lazy or stupid and so need to have that knowledge imposed on them by an external reviewer. Static analysis is cheap, and more importantly it's automatic. The alternative is to spend more time doing code review, but that's a bottleneck.
I've never actually seen it get a compiler issue arising from lifetimes, so it seems to one-shot that stuff just fine. Although my work is typically middle of the road, non-HFT trading applications, not super low-level.
I've built tools with both Go and Rust as LLM experiments, and it is a real advantage for Go that the test/compile cycle is much faster.
I've been successful with each, I think there's positives and negatives to both, just wanted to mention that particular one that stands out as making it relatively more pleasant to work with.