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Comment by EnPissant | Hacker News Reader

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This reads nothing at all like AI text. It's full of grammatical errors and clipped sentences. It's written in the style of a message board post.

Why do you think that?

Because it follows same structure as the one used by LLM-s. At least there is a reason to think so — before you've tried to actually read the article and realize LLM-s just don't write text like this... yet. Of course, this structure is also the one used by scientific articles, which I read a lot too, so I'm really inclined to follow this style. "Has the form of scientific article but statements are not precise = AI slop" — that's the implication.

Funny fact: one of the reasons Qwen suggested my article is LLM-generated is because it considered link as impossible. I was so gaslit I opened the article and clicked the link. And it worked. Mic drop.

The ragebait part is because it feels more provocative than sincere.

Some examples from the introduction:

> Its compilation is slow. I mean SLOW. Slower than C++. I know over years Rust became several times faster, but objectively we need it to be two orders of magnitude faster, not just two times.

I've done significant C++ and Rust and Rust compiles WAY faster than C++ for day-to-day incremental compilation. C++ suffers from the header inclusion problem and modules may as well not exist because you can't practically use them.

> Arc<Mutex<Box<T>>>

This is intentionally over complicated, there is no reason for the Box to be there.

> You cannot get 99.999% reliability with Rust — it crashes all the time.

What does this even mean?

>I've done significant C++ and Rust and Rust compiles WAY faster than C++ for day-to-day incremental compilation. C++ suffers from the header inclusion problem and modules may as well not exist because you can't practically use them.

It really depends on what you are compiling. I did lots of C/C++ that compiled 50k lines of code in 10 seconds FROM SCRATCH — I doubt you can do it in Rust. To be fair, headers in that project were somewhat optimized for compilation speed (not "hardcore", but "somewhat"). People forgot how fast C/C++ compilation can be without 10 Boost includes in each module.

>This is intentionally over complicated, there is no reason for the Box to be there.

Arc<RwLock<Option<T>>> — sounds good now? Don't get me wrong — C++ can be just as horrible, but Rust made it a rule, you can only write your program like this.

>What does this even mean?

I've already answered above, but I can repeat: there are runtime models that allow crash and recover, there are models that crash and limp. In Rust there is only one model of crash: you just crash.

> It really depends on what you are compiling. I did lots of C/C++ that compiled 50k lines of code in 10 seconds FROM SCRATCH — I doubt you can do it in Rust. To be fair, headers in that project were somewhat optimized for compilation speed (not "hardcore", but "somewhat"). People forgot how fast C/C++ compilation can be without 10 Boost includes in each module.

Incremental compiles in Rust are very fast because it has an actual module system instead of textual include. I don't care much how long from scratch compiles take, but even there my experience is Rust is faster than C++.

> Arc<RwLock<Option<T>>> — sounds good now? Don't get me wrong — C++ can be just as horrible, but Rust made it a rule, you can only write your program like this.

I'm not sure what non-garbage collected language would be better here. C++ would be about the same. C would be far far worse as it has no templates. Garbage collection would allow you to omit the Arc, and a language like Java where nearly _everything_ is optional would allow you to omit the Option, but I don't think many people would make this trade.

> I've already answered above, but I can repeat: there are runtime models that allow crash and recover, there are models that crash and limp. In Rust there is only one model of crash: you just crash.

You haven't defined what "crash" means. Rust uses a Result types for error flow and you have just as much control over recovery as any other language. If you are talking about panic, well yeah, that's like calling abort() in C, except it allows more fine grained error recovery with catch_unwind instead of a global SIGABRT handler or w/e for your OS.

> I doubt you can do it in Rust.

You absolutely can. You'll need to pay attention to how things are structured and not all codebases will be equally amenable to such techniques, but those are shared characteristics with C++.

As you said, "It really depends on what you are compiling."

> In Rust there is only one model of crash: you just crash.

Hardly. Why else would catch_unwind exist?

I don’t disagree with the rage bait assessment.

lists, em dashes, headings and typical length of LLM response.

Yeah, the article was written in Markdown, LLM-s employ markdown formatting too. It's not a typical length of LLM response — it's approx 1.5-2.0 times longer than a typical long LLM response. Not easily noticable to a human being though, indeed.

I disagreed with your article, but this critique of it is just goofy. I also write in Markdown, use lists where appropriate, and — gasp! — write em dashes where appropriate.

You think an AI wrote "So, is the Rust bad or good? It’s neither. It’s a mediocre programming language with thousands of man-month put into its development — this fact alone makes Rust a viable tool"? No it didn't.

I 100% think LLMs were involved in its production, just not written wholesale.

It's 200% LLM used in production — like 10 hours of dialogs right before writing the article. I had much more hours of coversations with Rust fanboys and it was mostly a waste of time, they just would not try to negotiate on Rust's weak points. I would definitely not be able to write the article with only human support — it's really sad to conclude that LLM-s are much better assistants because they are neutral and objective.

Were any parts copy pasted from LLM output (and possible changed after)?

Why would I do this and why do you think I did? Or do you feel like my english is so bad I'm probably writing ransom note out of pieces of LLM output? I can ensure you I'm good enough at typing and talking in english to not require copy-pasting. Do you have any quotes from the article that you feel like were copy-pasted from LLM?

soon we ll hafta rite lyk dis and maybe தேவையே இல்லாம include other languages in the text, just so people won't automatically say it's AI written.

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