alt Hacker NewsAntirez has been writing C for a million years so is much more familiar with it than Rust.
Also the goal of the project is to squeeze the absolute maximum performance and capability possible out of limited hardware resources (compared to clusters of B200s or something).
Does Rust even give you good access to low-level code on different platforms? And if so, how much extra work do you need to do to make it acceptable to the compiler? And is that work worthwhile if you are not going to get the security guarantees of normal Rust code? Is it a worthwhile tradeoff when the goal is performance?
Those are real questions by the way, not rhetorical. If Rust could work well for this type of project then I would like to know.
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Yes, Rust gives you great access to low-level code on different platforms, including SIMD. It is also alias-free by default, and gives you excellent primitives to write multi-threaded code with compile-time correctness guarantees, which is how projects such as zlib-rs end up significantly faster than their C counterparts.[1]
It's about as good as it can get for this kind of code.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1ixt1ei/zlibrs_is_fas...
> Antirez has been writing C for a million years so is much more familiar with it than Rust.
This is explicitly an AI-coded project, Antirez argues that LLMs are worse at writing Rust than C because so much high quality systems code (think e.g. sendmail) that ends up in AI training sets is C, not Rust. Another related argument is that the more detailed syntax and compiler feedback found in Rust compared to C are really a negative for LLM workflows.
There's plenty of room to disagree wrt. this of course: without the strong typing checks of Rust around e.g. indirect references, safety and correctness ends up being a global property in typical C programs, and LLMs are terrible wrt. reasoning about global properties. You're better off forcing them to adapt to a different local syntax that does a more complete job of enforcing modularity, since this is comparatively foolproof.