• 2.48K Posts
  • 6.69K Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: April 27th, 2023

help-circle
  • I agree that dependencies and package management is a real problem in programming nowadays, but it is not a problem unique to Rust. In fact, I struggle to name a single popular language nowadays that doesn’t have the exact same problems.

    It’s not so much “But that’s not how you build stable software.” It’s more like “But that’s not how you build software [at all today].” Modern software is powered by loads of shared packages, that’s just how all modern languages work. This is equally true for Rust and Python.

    Rust still has the edge here btw. Rust libraries (crates) are often very high quality with very good documentation. The language again helps here a lot, by providing extensive tooling for automatic documentation generation. Documentation in other languages are is far less helpful or poorly written. This is also again something that helps an AI write better code (just as it helps humans write better code).

    The packaging also helps elevate Rust to a high-level language, because you can build easily usable abstractions in packages that can be used in simple programs. All the complexity can be hidden away in a crate and suddenly Rust feels more like Python. I think that’s actually a good thing from package managers.


  • Right now everyone is asking their AI agents to rewrite programs in Rust or C or assembly. This is fun, but it’s not a serious attempt at optimization.

    C or assembly seems pointless and only for performance. But the reason people (re) write programs in Rust is because Rust as a language has a lot of guardrails that help make a program more stable, more correct. That reliability is the real reason for Rust. The performance is just a cherry on top.

    This is actually exactly what you want in a language for AI. This is anecdotal from my side, but in my experience, an AI writing Rust will write far less sloppy crap than an AI writing Python.

    Most of the argument against Rust has historically been that prototyping is slow and the language is a bother to write because the compiler makes it hard. But this only holds if humans are the bottleneck for writing the code! Rust therefore has all of the benefits but basically none of the downsides when having an AI write it.



















  • Men ærligt, giver det ikke også okay mening? LLMen er jo basically en meget bedre søgemaskine til den slags problemer end Google er (måske bedre end Google nogensinde har været, på trods af at Google jo engang var god). Desuden kan LLMen undersøge dit præcise setup og gøre hjælpen fuldstændig personlig til dit specifikke problem, i stedet for at du kun finder generiske løsninger på nettet.

    Det problem der er med det, er at du ikke finder de generiske løsninger og dermed ikke lærer at anvende generiske løsninger på specifikke problemer, og der er måske et læringsproblem der. Men udover det er problemløsning med LLM da meget, meget bedre end mulighederne der var der før.