> There's less and less reason to use GC'd languages in the agentic coding era.
Faster iteration, maybe? Rust's safety guarantee isn't exactly free (while still being very excellent) and does affect iteration time. I have a private project (>300K LoC) that has been translated from Python to TypeScript and the reason we couldn't use Rust was definitely the iteration time.
Eh... rust's safety isn't free, but not having it and wasting time on "oh I forgot to change this call site" also isn't free. On the whole I'd say the safety assists in iteration time.
What costs rust in iteration time in my opinion is the low level (by default) nature of it. There's a faster-to-iterate language that has yet to be created which is rust but we sacrifice performance (and memory fiddling ergonomics for the odd person who does that) so we don't have to worry about things like whether a variable is stack or heap allocated. Which is in the direction of a GCed language but retains the mutable-xor-aliasable semantics.
Between rust and current GCed languages though... I guess I agree with "maybe" in both directions.
I like using Odin with LLMs for this. it's a simple statically typed language with no GC and very fast compile