Comment by vatsachak

20 hours ago

Don't forget his LLM based text compression software that won awards.

Guy is a genius. I hope he tries Rust someday

7 comments

vatsachak

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elevation  19 hours ago

Fabrice, if you're reading this, please consider replacing Rust instead with your own memory safe language.

The design intent of Rust is a powerful idea, and Rust is the best of its class, but the language itself is under-specified[1] which prevents basic, provably-correct optimizations[0]. At a technical level, Rust could be amended to address these problems, but at a social level, there are now too many people who can block the change, and there's a growing body of backwards compatibility to preserve. This leads reasonable people to give up on Rust and use something else[0], which compounds situations like [2] where projects that need it drop it because it's hard to find people to work on it.

Having written low-level high-performance programs, Fabrice Bellard has the experience to write a memory safe language that allows hardware control. And he has the faculties to assess design changes without tying them up in committee. I covet his attentions in this space.

[0]: https://databento.com/blog/why-we-didnt-rewrite-our-feed-han...

[1]: https://blog.polybdenum.com/2024/06/07/the-inconceivable-typ...

[2]: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/12/21/dropping-hyper/

  • Lerc  18 hours ago

    I think of Rust might trigger a new generation of languages that are developed with the hindsight of rust.

    The principle of zero cost abstractions avoids a slow slide of compromising abstraction cost, but I think there could be small cost abstractions that would make for a more pragmatic language. Having Rust to point at to show what performance you could be achieving would aid in avoiding bloating abstractions.

  • userbinator  10 hours ago

    Bellard likely doesn't care one bit about memory safety or whatever other trendy things are popular these days.

  • saagarjha  13 hours ago

    > At a technical level, Rust could be amended to address these problems

    I don’t think it can, no.