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Ask HN: Any objective research on which languages are best for AI agents?
I keep reading articles that suggest that Rust or Go or some other language is optimal for AI development because of feature X or lack of issue Y.
Has there been any actual head to head comparison of this using frontier models? Any benchmarks that purport to measure this?
- steveklabnik 3mo agoThe frontier moves quickly enough that empiric testing is often out of date by the time that it’s published.
- mwigdahl 3mo agoFor sure! It's possible there are relatively invariant properties that make one language or another "better" for LLM coding in general though (even if that's just the self-fulfilling prophecy of size of the training corpus).
- steveklabnik 3mo agoI’m in agreement that I think that these exist, but I just haven’t seen anything that justifies this belief of mine yet. I have been looking, but it’s possible I just haven’t seen anything seen it. I’ve seen a lot of blog posts with fairly dubious claims here with relatively flimsy evidence. And I’ve seen a few papers trying to tackle the topic. But I think it’s a very open area of research currently.
- andsoitis 3mo agoDSLs work especially well with LLMs. DSLs focus on a narrow set of concepts in a single domain.
- Leftium 3mo agoTheo video based on data from Tencent's Autocodebench: https://youtu.be/iV1EcfZSdCM https://youtu.be/iV1EcfZSdCM Conclusion: Elixir was the best (had the highest problem solve rate). Reasons (Theo's interpretation): - code collocation, where documentation is integrated directly within the source code - design philosophy of a language (readability, clear idioms, and strict expectation management) --- Sources from video: - https://github.com/Tencent-Hunyuan/AutoCodeBenchmark/tree/main https://github.com/Tencent-Hunyuan/AutoCodeBenchmark/tree/ma... - https://martinalderson.com/posts/which-programming-languages-are-most-token-efficient/ https://martinalderson.com/posts/which-programming-languages... - https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/19/nanolang/#atom-everything https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/19/nanolang/#atom-everyth...
- SuperLede 3mo ago[flagged]
- markus_zhang 3mo agoWhich language is worst for AI? Just curious.
- aero-spacer 3mo ago[flagged]