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Comment by rowanG077 | Hacker News Reader

Generally building something is not about "What does this teach us?" but rather "What can this be used for?". You don't build a house and as "What does this teach us?". It's honestly almost a perverse question to primarily ask for something that aims to have practical value.

The clear reason this has worth is that it's much faster than TSC.

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HN is going to be a weird place to be between people loving AI and the loss of loving tech. I don’t remember last time I watched a good tech dev video. At least the video game industry is a little bit shielded from this but soon it will be the same when we see the speed AI is advancing.

No more joy crafting things as a dev…!

I don't see at all that this is stifling love of tech. Sure if you liked to engage in language wars or vim vs emacs or tabs vs spaces then yes that's over. But tech as we know it is currently exploding, a ton of stuff that simply was not practically possible before is now possible.

Give us some examples of things that were not practically possible. Things are practically possible if the time or money is wisely spent, even if it takes a human a bit longer.

Money and time are precisely the point. Things are not practically possible of a X would cost 100K to develop and it's worth was 30K. But now that it costs 2K to develop it is suddenly practically possible.

1. A person building alternatives to photoshop single handedly: https://gizmodo.com/someone-vibe-coded-a-free-knockoff-of-ad...

2. The abundance of game decomps and recomps becoming available. Literally dozens of example in this space.

3. Reverse engineering of obscure software. A ton of oppertunities lie here.

4. As this posts indicate, severely accelerating existing software by re-writing it in language that are not terrible for performance.

5. Analyzing large volumes of unstructured information.

6. Creating one-off engineering and scientific tools.

7. Beating essentially all traditional Linux distribution, see Omarchy.

8. A personal example: I'm remaking the engine of an old game commercial game in rust.

I'm honestly a bit taken aback that this question is even asked. The volume of software is exploding and the power of the individual has increased a hundredfold.

I guess I’m just perverted then.

That's why the commenter said

> It’s just a less maintained, less tested implementation

Then they asked if it teaches something because it is a risky utility to them. You're trying to make it sound a lot weirder.

The point is that it's clearly not just a less maintained, less tested implementation. It's 1.61x faster for one in real world apps, in some case even almost 4x faster.

I am curious why it's faster. Golang isn't that much slower than Rust, aside from the garbage collector. 4x performance improvements is much bigger than what I expected.

If that was your point, why did you spend a whole paragraph saying "teach us? What a perverse question."

The comment I responded on put forth a generic argument that implied if we can not learn from it it has no value. That is what I was responding to.

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