Why didn't they use Rust in the first place then ? All this was true before AI
Among them:
- much easier to iterate on (due to the language being simpler and compilation much faster)
- native C/C++ interops (Zig can compile C and C++ and mix it with Zig) which is crucial for a node-replacement runtime that runs an open source JS engine
- fewer dependencies and trivial static linking
I guess that now that they've been acquired by Anthropic there's this combination of having both in-house Rust talent, AI which does better on Rust, and the funding and resources necessary to undertake such a migration.
I'm struggling to figure out how to even start interrogating this notion. What does this mean?