Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

amelius

No because it means people will use Rust for the wrong reasons.

Systems programming is only a tiny fraction of code out there.

Approaching every problem as a systems programming problem is a massive waste of resources and intellect.

View on HN

For small to medium projects, an LLM can write functional (if not well crafted) Rust.

Considering how easy this is now, why choose a heavier, slower and less typesafe language?

Could choose a similar weight, similar speed, equal or more typesafe language though :)

Ada? Other than c and c++ everything else benchmarks 2-4 times slower than rust for compute bound tasks, even after jit warmup. I'm up for ada though, especially with an llm where I don't have to type all that verbose syntax.

OCaml? Haskell? Idris?

Lots of options with no jit or warmup

I'm not against jit or warmup, just saying it doesn't actually catch up for compute bound tasks in my experience. Haskell and ocaml would definitely be next on my list, but they do take a very good hit in performance over ada or rust. I wouldn't say they were similar in performance, certainly. There is a pretty big cliff between the systems languages and everything else performance-wise. For a lot of things it doesn't matter I know, but none of those things are domains I've ever worked in. I've never had a project in my professional career where we didn't descope requirements to fit the available compute.

Ok, so write your app in the garbage collected language, and then tell the LLM to translate it to Rust :)

I find it kind of shocking that Anthropic doesn't see it this way.

Claude Code has whole game engine built into it. God knows why.

Tell us more.

perhaps they refer to Claude code being built on top of a React renderer for terminals, Ink https://github.com/vadimdemedes/ink

and is riddled with timeouts and intervals in useffects

Edit: I lost the context that this is about building devtools where you can’t just throw more hardware at the problem. But perhaps my answer still explains the reality: anthropic builds Claude with Claude so Claude needs to be easy to build with Claude.

Easier to read for humans is easy to read for LLMs. A more expressive language will bring about fewer misunderstandings when you apply stochastic tools like LLMs.

Just be sure you don’t choose something heavier/slower that is not more expressive.

it saves a lot of resources - for instance my devices would probably use less than half of the memory it uses now and I wouldn't hear the fan.

You won't hear the fan because you're still building it.

The resources I was talking about are developers × time.

I am talking about using software - if software is used by many people, that's the more relevant resource usage.

It is a common trend for companies to optimize for visible CapEx at the cost of increased but invisible OpEx for consumers.

Since when is Rust a systems programming language? On their website it is defined as "general-purpose programming language".

>Approaching every problem as a systems programming problem is a massive waste of resources and intellect.

If someone took their time and decided to use Rust maybe their first couple projects won't be as efficient, but they will learn the language and how to use it in the best ways, they will contribute to the ecosystem, etc. Again, I'm looking at the big picture and not specific project case.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com