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Comment by gilgamesh-OG | Hacker News Reader

This is a great point, previously the tradeoff was build in python in 2 weeks versus 2 months and even if your app performance is worse you built it faster and maintain it more easily. Now I am wondering, for all the devs who do not have experience in Rust, can they still maintain the code when the usage limits get hit? Since there is an automated test suite and easily verifiable results, this is a good area where you can be assured the compiler is working properly; however, if new features need to be added, I'm not sure how easy it will be for them.

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It depends... about the hardest part for me to keep track of in Rust is complex lifetimes... you can do things and organize in ways to reduce this cognitive overhead, but it may result in slightly less performant code.

The real boost to AI, is it can do a lot of things pretty easily, that you might not on your own... really thorough test suites, or even standing up a demo application just to test a single complex component. The latter I've done a few times now.

Rust itself seems to be very well supported by the coding models and is a pretty sane language to use. I cannot really comment on Go, as I've been using a lot more Rust as I have been targeting stand alone and wasm targets respectively, the latter really isn't a good structure for Go. I can say that C# is a really mixed bag, and would assume Java is similar.

Dynamic languages like python or JS might be faster to build, but they’re certainly not easier to maintain. The type system still exists, it just changes at runtime (JS) and exists purely in your head (both of them). The value of static analysis, like reading code, goes down significantly.

As codebases grow it only gets worse, as more of your mind is filled with building a mental model of the type system.

That’s why you end up seeing crazy defensive coding practices in these languages. In PHP, I often see isset and instanceof spammed everywhere because nobody can garauntee that thing X is actually X all the time.

Honestly it is a moot point. The benefit of languages like Python compare to Rust still hold. Algorithmic complexity rules the roost. For the hot path, write a C extension that is rigorously tested. Python you can iterate much faster same as any scripting language.

The AI can iterate faster in Python too, guaranteed, because you don’t have any compile time.

Also, this is how AIs already get stuff done: they write SCRIPTS to perform tasks in a sandbox with tool calls. This is the future, dynamic languages, not using static languages.

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