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I could see Rust becoming the language for coding agents, because it has such solid guardrails built in. I could also see it slipping into obscurity as LLMs get
by apitman 2mo ago
I could see Rust becoming the language for coding agents, because it has such solid guardrails built in. I could also see it slipping into obscurity as LLMs get faster and compile times become a more and more obvious bottleneck on iteration speeds.
- Aurornis 2mo ago> I could also see it slipping into obscurity as LLMs get faster and compile times become a more and more obvious bottleneck on iteration speeds. I’ve worked on some very large Rust projects. The incremental compile times are nowhere near the same order of magnitude of a bottleneck as an LLM turn.
- apitman 2mo agoI don't doubt this is true for many projects currently (though it's not for a bevy project I'm working on). Have you tried Cerebras, Groq, Taalas, et al? It was a paradigm shift for me.
- Aurornis 2mo agoI have, but even with the high token generation speed, incremental Rust compile times were not a bottleneck. I was disagreeing with the concept that incremental compile times could be a bottleneck. LLMs are even better at doing large swaths of work at once and having it compile first or second try than a human.
- apitman 2mo agoOh are you saying the human remains the bottleneck?
- nullsanity 2mo ago[dead]
- rr808 2mo agoHow long does a compile take? Because this was the biggest issue for me. I dont really like Python but the ability to make some changes then run it instantly is wild for me.
- woodruffw 2mo agoYou probably already know this, but I figure it bears repeating: most people should be running `cargo check` during development, not `cargo build`. The latter is only necessary when you actually need the built binary; the former is sufficient for type- and borrow-checking. (On my local machine, `cargo check` is roughly 2x faster than `cargo build`. It's still slower than hot-reloaded Python, but it's rarely my development bottleneck.)
- pjmlp 2mo agoA non starter for anything related to graphics or UI development, which is kind of most Rust stuff are CLIs or TUIs, like being back on curses heyday, Turbo Vision and Clipper.
- Klonoar 2mo agoVarious Rust UI projects have been working towards hot-reloadable capabilities, based on the work from the Dioxus team. IME it's just not really that big of a deal at this point. YMMV, etc.
- pjmlp 2mo agoI am aware, still far away from what something like C++ Builder was already offering in the 1990's, let alone other more modern alternatives.
- woodruffw 2mo agoIs it? An immense amount of the world’s graphical software is written for native graphical targets like SwiftUI, where the iteration cycle is similarly bound to build times. It’s certainly painful, but I don’t think it’s a non-starter.
- insanitybit 2mo agoI use LLMs and rust and compile times are absolutely a significant area of degradation. I love rust, I think it's the best language for LLMs, but the biggest win Rust could get for agentic development is to speed up the compiler.
- embedding-shape 2mo agoNeither of you talk about what sort of machine you're sitting on. Back when I used a netbook, I'd agree with you, for developing quick off programs, the compile times are horrible. But as someone on a workstation now, compilation times are the least of my problems, and disk space is more of a concern for me. You also don't share what LLM you use, some of them reason a lot, some of them nothing, some a bit. Again, personally I use LLMs with their maximum reasoning always, trading quality for speed/waiting every single time, and even compiling the Linux kernel would be faster than most LLM responses I get nowadays, for me, on a workstation.
- insanitybit 2mo agoI'm on an M4 Macbook. I use Codex, gpt, and Claude in various configurations, including Fable, xhigh, medium, high, ultracode, etc.
- dnautics 2mo ago> I think it's the best language for LLMs because of the type system? i work in ~dynamically typed language and the llms almost never make a type error.
- insanitybit 2mo agoThe type system is great and gives extremely fast feedback. The performance wins are also incredible, it just feels like you're throwing 100s of megabytes of RAM away and 10x latency when you don't choose rust now, and for little reason. The testing tooling is really solid - property testing, fuzzing, mutation testing, etc, is all easy to use. Code structure with nice abstractions that don't become spaghetti is nice (traits, enums, etc). Static binaries as a production artifact is really nice. Supply chain story is pretty solid with cargo-vet. It's hard to come up with anything where I think Rust isn't "best in class" other than compile times.
- ReactiveJelly 2mo agoJust run Rust compiles in the cloud. Really, if you're using a SaaSS LLM like Claude or Copilot or ChatGPT, which already sends all your code to someone else's computer to run on a beefy GPU, they should just send the Rust code to the same datacenter and send you back a binary. Little shocked that Anthropic isn't offering this. Rust compile speeds will matter less and less as hardware gets faster.
- dabinat 2mo agoCompile times are being worked on: https://rust-lang.github.io/rust-project-goals/2026/roadmap-fast-builds.html https://rust-lang.github.io/rust-project-goals/2026/roadmap-...
- yencabulator 2mo ago> compile times Try https://github.com/kunobi-ninja/kache https://github.com/kunobi-ninja/kache