4 ms·
Rust is better. It just is. Go is not bad. But as a long time go advocate, the hurdle for my teams using rust is gone, and thus everything is now rust.
by mbrumlow 2mo ago
Rust is better. It just is. Go is not bad. But as a long time go advocate, the hurdle for my teams using rust is gone, and thus everything is now rust.
- rsyring 2mo agoI guess the difference in compile times doesn't matter enough?
- nchmy 2mo agocan you elaborate?
- greenavocado 2mo agoRust compiler is a tyrant. Type system is strict. Borrow checker is relentless. LLMs can't slop too much without being beaten up by the compiler.
- threethirtytwo 2mo agoThis is true. I'd like metrics on this though. It could be that LLMs find go easier so they end up writing better code and rarely hitting static errors like a human would in rust. IT could be through scientific measurements that the benefits of static checking could be negligible for LLMs. No way to know until someone does the science on this. Until then it's just people saying that more static checking is better. But I do think, anecdotally, python is horrible for LLMs.
- greenavocado 2mo agoUntil we can measure slop accurately it's all guesswork
- vorticalbox 2mo agoTrue but if the reviewer doesn’t have an intimate understanding of rust then the fact it can’t “slop” is no different than unreadable slop. Go is simple, no “magic” marcos or meta programming even with just a little programming in any language it’s not hard to understand what the go code is doing.
- greenavocado 2mo agoThat's simply not true. I wrote a piece of software in Rust that is non-trivial, robust, 50k lines of code, and 100% LLM generated, used by four people productively with only one or two minor bugs in the past two man-months
- vorticalbox 2mo agoquestion did you review the code or did you test it was working? these are different things. and if you did review it, could an engineer without deep Rust experience have reviewed it just as effectively? I have no doubt that you can get a LLM to write working bug free code in any language but that is not the topic of the article or my comment.
- greenavocado 2mo agoProbably at 50x the cost LOL
- simonw 2mo agoPersonally I find Rust a lot harder to read than Go. If you're going to have an agent write most of your code readability is very important.
- threethirtytwo 2mo agoI have an agent read most of the code as well. The agent explains things to me in plain english. The default sentiment is humans should read code it's more progressive and a leap of faith to start giving that up. Obviously, I get why you feel humans still reading code is important, but if you look at the progress of AI for the past couple of years, that gap is closing. The trendlines speak of a future where it becomes less and less important. This was exactly what happened with writing code. Now most people don't write code.
- simonw 2mo agoI don't read all of the code produced by my agents any more, but I like to reserve the ability to do so if I run into a particularly confusing bug, or for any code that's security adjacent.
- threethirtytwo 2mo agoSame. But usually if I need to read code, I end up telling my agent to summarize it for me.
- eliasson 2mo ago> Now most people don't write code. I use LLM daily to write code for and "with" me, I also write code without LLM. Most people I come across mix it up. A few do it all by hand, and equally few all by LLM I would say. Is that just in my corner of the world?
- threethirtytwo 2mo agoThe trendlines are moving away from this. It's all happening so fast that not every company is on the same page, but from what I see we are quickly converging on not writing anymore code. My entire company for example does not write a line of code. We manage agents and that's it. Many, many, many companies and people are already doing this.
- threethirtytwo 2mo agoI agree, but this doesn't justify anything. Saying rust is better because it "just is" won't convince anyone. I'd like to know why you think it's better.
- jhawk28 2mo agoZig seems to have more closely aligned with what Go devs prefer.
- jdw64 2mo agoGo doesn't have memory safety issues because of its GC, while Zig has UB problems. Zig might have slightly better performance, but I don't think choosing a language without memory safety is a good idea
- iberator 2mo agoexcept Rust is HARD while GO is super easy.
- amazingamazing 2mo agoIgnoring performance for the moment (because most situations are bottlenecked on something else), why is rust better?
- ramoz 2mo agoidk. In my experience the build/compile experience has been far worse esp for fast iterating. Even concurrency models did not seem as intuitive as Go's. Im no systems expert - have deployed practical and performant distributed systems though.
- odo1242 2mo agoPersonally, Rust or Typescript both happen to be better than Go for me. TypeScript has better type-safety and tooling for user-facing apps, and Rust has better type-safety and tooling for algorithmic stuff or stuff that needs to run fast.