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Python has a much more mature ecosystem than Rust, especially for AI/ML stuff. I ran into a rust crate that purported to do a certain ML algorithm but did not d

by rchowe 5mo ago

Python has a much more mature ecosystem than Rust, especially for AI/ML stuff. I ran into a rust crate that purported to do a certain ML algorithm but did not do it correctly. I managed to write a replacement with Claude though. I do think enforcing correctness at the type system level is a good idea for AI, which is why I often choose languages like C# and Rust over Python. However, for some things Python is definitely the correct tool for the job.

dev360 5mo ago
Definitively something to be said for AI/ML library support. I find myself going with Rust / TS for a ton of my backend work lately though, even though I'm a huge Django fan for backend.
sshine 5mo ago
I almost always pick Rust. Recently I wrote a plugin for something that was written in Go. I could have used Rust, but Go for one felt right because if the thing turned out well, others would surely find more value in having one toolchain. The main reason is that you’re capable of reading it if you need to. And the recipient ecosystem expects a language. That’s why some data science communities pick R, MatLab, Julia, Python or Mojo not depending on what’s superior tech, but what their peers speak.
- josh-sematic 5mo ago
  What peers are speaking Mojo? I’m not aware of any place it’s penetrated enough to be a “lingua Franca”
- CharlieDigital 5mo ago
  C# feels kinda nice because it's a good balance. Very good static typing, Roslyn analyzers, good tooling and decent hot reload (for a compiled language), really good ORM (EF Core) that implements UoW and reduces a lot of the need for transaction management (simplifying the code), flexible enough and fast enough for various kinds of use cases. Source generators are underrated as well since they can make the code very terse and legible by generating a lot of standard boilerplate.
  - alexjplant 5mo ago
    I've written this before, but C# is a great language held back by its culture. I'd say that 80% of C# shops I've seen used it because they were started in the late 00s by some IT guy with a surplus HP server and a dream whose whole world was Microsoft products. They were staffed by people with little knowledge of OSS products who self-identify as ".NET developers" instead of software engineers. Almost invariably they seem to have some gnarly legacy monolith that everybody is slowly chipping away at while old-timers continue deploying .NET services to IIS running on Azure VMs because it's a small evolution of what they've been doing for the better part of 20 years. In the interest of fairness the San Francisco version of this is also a thing: a giant, untyped ball of Rails spaghetti from the same period running on Heroku that everybody has Stockholm Syndrome'd their way into loving because of Ruby's elegance and beauty. The burden is merely shifted from a large Microsoft to a series of small SaaS companies :-) Exceptions to this rule exist (hence my "80%") and modern .NET is lovely but it seems that the non-Java/Python mindshare is now taken up by the Golangs and Rusts of the world. It's a true shame since I do love C# for basically being a better Java.
    - DeathArrow 5mo ago
      Hmm, I am working on C# microservices based apps since 6 years ago. And I always deployed on cloud using Linux, usually in Kubernetes. I used Google Cloud and AWS beside Azure. The whole stack is open source, Kubernetes, Docker, Hashicorp tools, Postgres, Redis, MongoDB, RabbitMQ, NATS, Kafka, Prometheus, Elastic Search, Kibana, Grafana and so on and so forth.
  - pier25 5mo ago
    Yeah C# is fantastic. I also love EF. I stopped using it because overall it feels like Microsoft has lost the plot with .NET.
    - stephbook 5mo ago
      What I hate about .NET is the atrocious naming. Net Core, Net Framework, Net Common Core, .NET.. And God forbid any of these frameworks ever expose what they are in a config file. You start a project, hand it to a colleague and he can't figure out whether it's Framework or Core by looking at the files. You Google and are immediately bombarded by 15 year old threads.
bsder 5mo ago
Yeah, I mean, if I'm going to step away from the Python ecosystem and let AI manage/polyfill my dependencies, I might as well shift the whole way to OCaml/F# rather than Rust. Then I get the benefits of GC and strong typing.
parpfish 5mo ago
i think the enforcing the type system is good with AI for a couple reasons: - (speculating) typed language have faster/better LSPs that can be used to more efficiently modify code with tool use. - when a human DOES need to step in and start investigating/modifying the code, the strong typing makes it much easier to get oriented within their spaghetticode
mountainriver 5mo ago
I think the only use cases are when it wraps low level C++ libs like ML libraries, and yes those are extremely difficult to reproduce
hocuspocus 5mo ago
I think the AI/ML ecosystem is a bit of a mess overall, things tend to work out of the box in Python because that's what everyone targets, but it doesn't necessarily say that much about maturity and robustness. In Rust you can use many C++ frameworks like libtorch or ONNX or specialized libraries (llama.cpp, whisper.cpp ...) via their bindings. Native projects such as Candle or Burn are not feature complete yet, but I assume they'll eventually get there and drive bigger communities compared to C++.

by rchowe 5mo ago

dev360 5mo ago

Definitively something to be said for AI/ML library support. I find myself going with Rust / TS for a ton of my backend work lately though, even though I'm a huge Django fan for backend.

sshine 5mo ago

I almost always pick Rust. Recently I wrote a plugin for something that was written in Go. I could have used Rust, but Go for one felt right because if the thing turned out well, others would surely find more value in having one toolchain. The main reason is that you’re capable of reading it if you need to. And the recipient ecosystem expects a language. That’s why some data science communities pick R, MatLab, Julia, Python or Mojo not depending on what’s superior tech, but what their peers speak.

josh-sematic 5mo ago
What peers are speaking Mojo? I’m not aware of any place it’s penetrated enough to be a “lingua Franca”
CharlieDigital 5mo ago
C# feels kinda nice because it's a good balance. Very good static typing, Roslyn analyzers, good tooling and decent hot reload (for a compiled language), really good ORM (EF Core) that implements UoW and reduces a lot of the need for transaction management (simplifying the code), flexible enough and fast enough for various kinds of use cases. Source generators are underrated as well since they can make the code very terse and legible by generating a lot of standard boilerplate.
- alexjplant 5mo ago
  I've written this before, but C# is a great language held back by its culture. I'd say that 80% of C# shops I've seen used it because they were started in the late 00s by some IT guy with a surplus HP server and a dream whose whole world was Microsoft products. They were staffed by people with little knowledge of OSS products who self-identify as ".NET developers" instead of software engineers. Almost invariably they seem to have some gnarly legacy monolith that everybody is slowly chipping away at while old-timers continue deploying .NET services to IIS running on Azure VMs because it's a small evolution of what they've been doing for the better part of 20 years. In the interest of fairness the San Francisco version of this is also a thing: a giant, untyped ball of Rails spaghetti from the same period running on Heroku that everybody has Stockholm Syndrome'd their way into loving because of Ruby's elegance and beauty. The burden is merely shifted from a large Microsoft to a series of small SaaS companies :-) Exceptions to this rule exist (hence my "80%") and modern .NET is lovely but it seems that the non-Java/Python mindshare is now taken up by the Golangs and Rusts of the world. It's a true shame since I do love C# for basically being a better Java.
  - DeathArrow 5mo ago
    Hmm, I am working on C# microservices based apps since 6 years ago. And I always deployed on cloud using Linux, usually in Kubernetes. I used Google Cloud and AWS beside Azure. The whole stack is open source, Kubernetes, Docker, Hashicorp tools, Postgres, Redis, MongoDB, RabbitMQ, NATS, Kafka, Prometheus, Elastic Search, Kibana, Grafana and so on and so forth.
- pier25 5mo ago
  Yeah C# is fantastic. I also love EF. I stopped using it because overall it feels like Microsoft has lost the plot with .NET.
  - stephbook 5mo ago
    What I hate about .NET is the atrocious naming. Net Core, Net Framework, Net Common Core, .NET.. And God forbid any of these frameworks ever expose what they are in a config file. You start a project, hand it to a colleague and he can't figure out whether it's Framework or Core by looking at the files. You Google and are immediately bombarded by 15 year old threads.

bsder 5mo ago

Yeah, I mean, if I'm going to step away from the Python ecosystem and let AI manage/polyfill my dependencies, I might as well shift the whole way to OCaml/F# rather than Rust. Then I get the benefits of GC and strong typing.

parpfish 5mo ago

i think the enforcing the type system is good with AI for a couple reasons: - (speculating) typed language have faster/better LSPs that can be used to more efficiently modify code with tool use. - when a human DOES need to step in and start investigating/modifying the code, the strong typing makes it much easier to get oriented within their spaghetticode

mountainriver 5mo ago

I think the only use cases are when it wraps low level C++ libs like ML libraries, and yes those are extremely difficult to reproduce

hocuspocus 5mo ago

I think the AI/ML ecosystem is a bit of a mess overall, things tend to work out of the box in Python because that's what everyone targets, but it doesn't necessarily say that much about maturity and robustness. In Rust you can use many C++ frameworks like libtorch or ONNX or specialized libraries (llama.cpp, whisper.cpp ...) via their bindings. Native projects such as Candle or Burn are not feature complete yet, but I assume they'll eventually get there and drive bigger communities compared to C++.