alt Hacker News> Rust is the best general-purpose language for the new world of AI-driven development.
Funny, the Python guys say Python is the best general-purpose language for AI and the Go guys say Go is the best general-purpose language for AI etc etc
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I've found that the guardrails of a strong, expressive type system are amazing for LLMs, especially if you don't use the top-of-the-line models but stick to the cheaper options. Agents need feedback to do their magic, and the type system is great for that.
But on the other hand, the compile time of Rust is really counterproductive. On large, established projects, most prompts I write now spend more time compiling on my machine than they spend outputting tokens. In a way this is great because the tokens are the expensive part, but it does mean that when faster LLMs will come, they will not meaningfully improve iteration speed for me.
I wonder how much of the compile time of Rust is inherent to the type system. There might be room for a language with slower runtime speed (GC?), but as good of a type system as Rust, so long as compile times are much faster. Switching languages has never been easier, anyone have any suggestions? IMO hard requirements are algebraic types and error handling based on them.
None of the other languages are as strict as rust is. With eager clippy and cargo lints and software design as close to the type system as possible, LLMs have tight guard rails to land on point.
Exactly my point. Everyone says agents are “best” at their language. Which probably translates to agents generate equally well for all programming languages. So, why would you not pick the programming language that gets you the best (fastest, least memory) end product?
Yeah, but only the Rust guys are right. ;-)
It's the Python guys whom I totally don't understand - it's all fun and dandy until you try to maintain and cleanup a legacy codebase of tens of millions lines of code in any dynamic language :)
With or without AI - doesn't matter. Only at that point you gain understanding of the limitations both of LLMs and of dynamic languages.
edit: Forgot about "Nightmare" difficulty - try enjoying dynamic languages and LLMs when your legacy codebase is earning tens of thousands $ per second.