Comment by CuriouslyC
10 days ago
With improvements in coding agents, rewriting code in rust is pretty damn easy, and with a battle tested reference implementation, it should be easy to make something solid. I wouldn't be surprised if we have full rewrites of everything in rust in the next few years, just because it'll be so easy.
I have had better experiences with LLMs translating code from one language to another than writing code from scratch, but I don't think the current state of LLMs makes it "pretty damn easy" to rewrite code in Rust, especially starting from garbage-collected languages like Perl or Lua.
Certainly it's plausible that in the next few years it'll be pretty damn easy, but with the rapid and unpredictable development of AI, it's also plausible that humanity will be extinct or that all current programming languages will be abandoned.
In the last day I've rewritten two service hot cores in rust using agents, and gotten speedups from 4x to >400x (simd+precise memory management) and gotten full equivalent test coverage basically out of the gates from agent rewrites. So I'd say my experience has been overwhelmingly positive, and while I might be ahead of the curve in terms of AI engineering ability, this capability will come to everyone soon with better models/tools.
That's great! What's a service hot core? Which agents are you finding most useful, and what's the best way to take advantage of them? I was recently surprised to see Antirez recommend copying and pasting code back and forth to a "frontier model" instead of using agents: https://antirez.com/news/154
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I don’t buy it but let’s say that in the best case this happens.
Then we’ll have a continuation of the memory safety exploit dumpster fire because these Rust ports tend to use a significant amount of unsafe code.
On the other hand, Fil-C has no unsafe escape hatches.
Think of Fil-C as the more secure but slower/heavier alternative to Rust
Hmm, maybe this should be on the project's homepage: recompiling with Fil-C is a more secure but slower and more-memory-consuming alternative to rewriting in Rust.
I want to write a detailed post about the strength of Fil-C’s memory safety guarantee at some point. I haven’t yet thought of a sufficiently precise way and sufficiently classy way to say it.
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By default you are right. However you can use static analysis and tooling guardrails to reject certain classes of unsafe code automatically, and force the agent to go back to the drawing board. It might take a few tries and a tiny amount of massaging but I don't doubt it'd get there.
If you could get there that way with Rust’s unsafe blocks then you could get there that way with C++
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Seems like this kind of talk might scare certain invested people.