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Comment by dralley | Hacker News Reader

I don't think Rust is particularly worse than Go in any of these respects.

- LLMs have clearly been trained on a lot of Rust as well

- Compile times are counterbalanced by strong compiler with excellent error messages, and "cargo check" can catch many issues without a full build.

- If you're willing to accept Go levels of performance from Rust, there's nothing preventing you from using copies and clones rather than borrows, which makes most code dead simple.

- For most major dependency types, there exists a clear "winner" in terms of community adoption, so the fact that it's not in the stdlib is not that problematic.

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I do not think "good error messages" is an even trade for "fast compile times." What happens is the LLM catches the error, then may hit another error, and try again. This leads to more tokens and more latency, and then after all that you have a longer compile time.

With that said, I have not done an extensive amount of agentic development in Rust, so maybe I just don't have the reps to compare fairly.

It's less that the error messages are just "good" with Rust, it's that more stuff gets caught at comptime, and many of them can be autoremediated by cargo fix or the compiler itself says exactly what should be changed.

Nothing costs more tokens than an LLM trying to debug errors caused at runtime which doesn't map well to it's "intelligence" compared to what Rust provides

Unless you have `cargo fix` hooked up to automatically run on any compiler error, every error is still is a round trip to the LLM. It may be trivial for the model to fix, but it's added latency and cost.

Rust compiles way slower in my experience. This is a major problem because ais need to recompile many times especially when it keeps running into borrow checker problems.

With golang, all borrow checker problems go away. This is a good trade off if your app is not cpu-bound, which most are not. If you need every last drop of performance then rust is a better choice of course.

However, I have run into a few cases of runtime null crashes in go.

> and "cargo check" can catch compile issues without a full build.

You only have to compile when you actually want to test the behavior, which tends to be right on the first try more often as a result of the strict compiler.

When I meant compile I also meant cargo check. That still takes way longer than go builds.

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