8 ms·
The other direction might be more interesting, in case rust drops in popularity in a couple of years, leaving behind a bunch of "let's rewrite in rust" efforts
by procaryote 11mo ago
The other direction might be more interesting, in case rust drops in popularity in a couple of years, leaving behind a bunch of "let's rewrite in rust" efforts
- speedgoose 11mo agoI am not convinced that anyone would take a working rust project and rewrite it in C. I don’t see any good reason to do so. When rust will lose popularity, it is going to happen eventually, I would bet it’s in favour of a newer and more promising programming language. Not C.
- VBprogrammer 11mo agoI think Rust has hit critical mass. It's now basically the default choice for something you want to perform well but want to be reasonably secure. For example, uv in the python ecosystem.
- m00dy 11mo agoRust is the clear winner of the LLM era. With code generation being so effortless, why would you write in any other language?
- throawayonthe 11mo agoi don't use LLMs, but i've heard people complain current LLMs are not good at writing Rust
- wizzwizz4 11mo agoCurrent LLMs are not good at writing any language you actually understand, unless you do so much of the work that you might as well have written the whole program yourself. They're excellent at doing things I'm not an expert at, though! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
- galangalalgol 11mo agoWe should make calculators like this for kids to learn on. Every so often it makes mistakes that you will spot if you could have done the arithmetic yourself and are just saving time. That is where ai code is at right now.
- bigstrat2003 11mo agoThis is exactly why I don't trust LLMs (and therefore why I don't use them). When dealing with something I know about I can see the many mistakes they make - I would have to be a complete fool to trust them to do better on subjects I don't know about.
- m00dy 11mo agoyeah that narrative was popular last year. You can't go wrong with LLMs on Rust.
- morcus 11mo agoMaybe I'm doing it wrong (using a variety of models on GitHub Copilot) but in complex tasks I often find that they give me code that doesn't quite compile (often due to lifetime errors, sometimes other issues)
- _alternator_ 11mo agoTry agents like Claude code. My experience was that the initial code was conceptually correct with some type errors on the first pass. It then iterated on compile errors about 6 times, tweaking the code to resolve the issues. Then it compiled and ran correctly. This was about 500 lines of working rust in about 10 minutes, approximately 25x my pace at writing rust. (I’m a bit of a beginner.)
- pessimizer 11mo agoThat narrative is still popular with LLMs themselves. If you ask an LLM whether it can code Rust, it will tell you that it can but not very well. They're good at web languages, python, and C/C++. As far as I can tell Rust works if you're already good at Rust and you can catch its screwups and strange architecture choices quickly.
- pjmlp 11mo agoThe ultimate goal is for LLM replace languages, and directly perform tasks, why bother with Rust when we will be using agentic runtimes?
- m00dy 11mo agoI feel so safe when my Rust code compiles; it feels like the program will run forever. I'm not sure what you mean by "agentic runtimes," but if they offer the same safety standards as Rust, I wouldn't mind using them.
- pjmlp 11mo agoBeware of too much expectations, https://edera.dev/stories/tarmageddon https://edera.dev/stories/tarmageddon
- m00dy 11mo agowhat you sharing is not a rust specific, It's the same for npm and pypy packages. Rust is native binary + fearless concurrency + memory safe and AI can help you to achieve these targets very fast. That's why Rust is the winner of all the languages, every software needs to be fast, secure and able to run forever.
- foldr 11mo agoIf you read HN you might get that impression, but that vast majority of software that needs security and good performance is being written in Java.
- andrewmcwatters 11mo ago[dead]
- dana321 11mo agoIf you were building a programming language, would you write it in Java or Rust?
- foldr 11mo agoI'm not personally a fan of Java, but if I was implementing a compiler, I'd pick a language with GC. There's pretty much no downside to a GC in that context, and it gives you more flexibility when working with graph data structures. If 'building a programming language' means writing an interpreter or VM, then I can see the attraction of Rust for that case. But writing interpreters and VMs is like 0.0001% of the programming that gets done in the world.
- childintime 11mo agoGraal and Truffle make the JVM look attractive, especially for this case!
- pjmlp 11mo agoIn those two alone, Java. There is no reason I would care about borrow checking implementing a compiler, and besides all the tooling, Java also has stuff like ANTRLR and MPS, and naturally Graal is a good playground for compiler backend tooling. However in general, I would rather look into OCaml, Haskell, F#, Scala.
- VBprogrammer 11mo agoI wouldn't be surprised if that was closer to the truth. A heck of a lot of boring software runs on the JVM. That said, it's a slightly different niche from command line tools.
- nacozarina 11mo agonew chips will always have a c compiler available long before anything else
- Avamander 11mo agoI would assume that an LLVM backend is created for new chips and then C is not the only thing getting support. There's very little point in just supporting C in that sense.
- nicoburns 11mo agoThat doesn't seem to have been an issue for recent new CPU architectures. RISC-V has excellent Rust support for example.
- camel-cdr 11mo agoNot really. Rust still doesn't support Arm SVE or RVV intrinsics.
- pjmlp 11mo agoAlongside a much safer C++ compiler. In 2025 there are hardly single language compiler toolchains being released. Also if the chip toolchain is based on a GCC or clang fork, there are several frontends to chose from.
- ghthor 11mo agoCompile speed maybe the only one. But hopefully that keeps becoming less of a difference
- rererereferred 11mo agoThat would also help use Rust in platforms that only have a C compiler.
- galangalalgol 11mo agoPeople have used mrustc like that to put rust on a c64. The number of targets that make sense from a word length perspective that aren't already supported by llvm are pretty small I think? You aren't going to compile rust to some fixed point dsp where a long is 48bits. The c anything is likely to generate won't compile in whatever odd not-quite-ansi c compiler the chip maker provides.
- indigoabstract 11mo agoThat could be interesting. If some new language or tool appears that automatically figures out the correct lifetime and ownership of the resources in your program, people (might be the same people) will call for rewrites from Rust into the new language, as you would no longer have to assign memory ownership manually.
- whatpeoplewant 11mo agoLanguage popularity is cyclical; the hedge is to treat Rust as an implementation detail behind stable, language-agnostic boundaries (protocols, C ABI, WASM) and invest in strong tests/specs. If Rust wanes, migrate piecemeal: keep interfaces, reimplement modules elsewhere, and verify parity with property tests and benchmarks. Multi-agent, agentic LLM workflows can prototype alternatives in parallel, generate FFI/interop shims, and cross-check behavior to de-risk the swap without another “big rewrite.”