Comment by zelphirkalt
16 hours ago
I very much doubt the ability of LLMs to provide leak-free, faulty memory management free, C code, because they are trained on loads of bad code in that regard. They will not output code of the quality that maybe 1% of C developers could, if even that many. Fact is, that even well paid and professional C/C++ developers introduce memory management issues in such code bases (see Chromium project statistics about this). So chances to get good C programs from LLMs, which learn from far lower quality code than Chromium, are probably very slim.
Vibe-coding a program that segfaults and you don't know why and you keep burning compute on that? Doesn't seem like a great idea.
He says in his article:
>Is C the ideal language for vibe coding? I think I could mount an argument for why it is not, but surely Rust is even less ideal.
I've been using Rust with LLMs for a long time (mid-2023?) now; cargo check and the cargo package system make it very easy for LLMs to check their work and produce high quality code that almost never breaks, and always compiles.
My favorite use for LLMs with Rust is using them as a macro debugger; they provide better error messages than the errors Cargo can provide. It's cool to take a macro and ask the LLM to do an expansion of it, to see what it would look like. Or, to take Rust code and ask the LLM to create a macro for it.
I agree that an LLM may make mistakes. But one advantage is, that you can also allocate resources for it to try and find its own mistakes. You can do this humans, but the grind wears away at them. Since this doesn't really happen with an LLM, it's pretty decent at catching it's own mistakes too.
Well, most LLM are fine tuned over higher quality data, this is kind of how they've kept improving them amongst other things.
The first pass is to learn the fundamentals of language, and then it is refined on curated datasets, so you could refine them on high quality curated C code.