Comment by mr_mitm
1 day ago
Same here. I had Claude write me a web based RSS feed reader in Rust. It has some minor glitches I still need to iron out, but it works great, is fast as can be, and is easy on the eyes.
1 day ago
Same here. I had Claude write me a web based RSS feed reader in Rust. It has some minor glitches I still need to iron out, but it works great, is fast as can be, and is easy on the eyes.
Haha glad to see someone else did something like this. A couple weeks ago I asked Claude to recommend a service that would allow me to easily view a local .xml file as an RSS feed. It instead built a .html RSS viewer.
Re "is fast as can be": in my experience generating C/Zig code via Codex, agent generated code is usually several multiples slower than hand optimized code.
Yeah, I’m sure my Claude generated email client could be even faster if I wrote it by hand. Modern computers can retire billions of instructions per second per core. All operations that aren’t downloading or processing gigabytes of data should be instant on modern computers.
Claude’s toy email client gets closer to the speed limit than Gmail does. Why is Gmail so slow? I have no idea.
I find the sweet spot is to take LLM generated code, then profile manually and heavily supervise or hand implement specific improvements.
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Look, it's an RSS reader, not a numeric solver for PDEs. What I clearly meant was: Every interaction is instant, no noticable delay at all, except the reader view, which makes a network request to an external site.
Hey, sorry, I just have to defuse assumptions people make when they see Rust, LLMs, and "as fast as can be" in short proximity. Your project is obviously cool, and I don't think the fact that it's likely still multiples more resource intensive than an absolutely minimal version takes away from that.
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you have to ask it to profile and optimize the code for you. Then have it document the changes and run it in a loop. It’ll do wonders.
I asked a cursor agent to do the same for a geotiff to pmtiles converter. It managed to optimize the performance from tens of days to half a day for the case I wanted to solve.
Given parent and GP are both using Claude... have you tried Claude? (I say this as someone who has not tried Claude recently. I did try Claude Code when it first came out, though.)
First, it is important for these discussions that people include details like I did. We're all better off to not generalize.
RE: Claude Code, no I haven't used it, but I did do the Anthropic interview problem, beating all of Anthropic's reported Claude scores even with custom harnesses etc.
It's not a dunk that agents can't produce "as fast as can be" code; their code is usually still reasonably fast; it's just often 2-10x slower than can be.
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Rust is the final language.
Defect free. Immaculate types. Safe. Ergonomic. Beautiful to read.
AI is going to be writing a lot of Rust.
The final arguments of "rust is hard to write" are going to quiet down. This makes it even more accessible.
> Rust is the final language.
> Defect free.
I am an upstream developer on the Rust Project (lang, library, cargo, others), and obviously a big fan of Rust. This kind of advocacy doesn't help us, and in fact makes our jobs harder, because for some people this kind of advocacy is their main experience of people they assume are representative of Rust. Please take it down a notch.
I think Rust is the best available language for many kinds of problems. Not yet all, but we're always improving it to try to work for more people. It gets better over time. I'd certainly never call it, or almost any other software, "defect free".
And I'd never call it "the final language"; we're building it to last the test of time, and we hope things like the edition system mean that the successor to Rust is a future version of Rust, but things can always change, and we're not the only source of great ideas.
If you genuinely care about Rust, please adjust your advocacy of Rust to avoid hurting Rust and generating negative perceptions of Rust.
I’d also add: as a lover of forward progress, I really hope rust isn’t the last good idea programming language designers have. I love rust. But there are dozens of things I find a bit frustrating. Unfortunately I don’t think I’m clever & motivated enough to write a whole new language to try to improve it. But I really hope someone else is!
For a taste: I wish we didn’t need lifetime annotations, somehow. I wish rust had first class support for self borrows, possibly via explicit syntax indicating that a variable is borrowed, and thus pinned. Unpin breaks my brain, and I wish there were ways to do pin projections without getting a PhD first. I wish for async streams. I wish async executors were in std, and didn’t take so long to compile. I could go on and on.
I feel like there’s an even simpler & more beautiful language hiding inside rust. I can’t quite see it. But I really hope someone else can bring it into the world some day.
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As a member of t-compiler, seconded.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
I'm sorry my autistic elation for Rust is perceived as being over the top, but I truly do mean everything I say. I could have articulated it in a less saccharine tone.
> > Defect free.
There's a Google talk on the matter. "Defect rate" / "defect free" is a term that is used quite a bit. I've latched onto this, because I find it true. Rust is a far more defect free language on a line by line basis measured and compared to other statically typed languages.
> And I'd never call it "the final language"
I honestly disagree, and I'm sticking to this prediction.
I don't think we're going to be writing code much longer by ourselves. The machines are going to outpace us soon.
Maybe something that's LLM-oriented will take over, but at that point these won't be "human" languages anymore. So I'll revise my claim to "Rust is the last human language".
If I want to serialize my thoughts to code, Rust is the language for it. It's probably the last one I'll be hand-writing or sending my revisions back to the LLM for.
Rust will also be an order of magnitude easier to author, at which point there shouldn't be much holding people back from producing it. If you have a choice between generating Java, C++, Go, or Rust, you're going to pick Rust almost every time unless you have to fit into those other ecosystems.
If you haven't used Claude or Codex with Rust, it's sublime and you should drop what you're doing to try it.
> Beautiful to read.
Oh my, there's a new language called Rust? Didn't they know there already is one? The old one is so popular that I can't imagine the nicely readable one to gain any traction whatsoever (even if the old one is an assault on the senses).
> Rust is the final language.
I honestly can't tell if this is a humorous attack or not.
Poe's law is validated once again.
It's honest. If we can serialize our ideas to any language for durability, Rust is the way to go.
It's not the best tool for the job for a lot of things, but if the LLMs make writing it as fast as anything else - whelp, I can't see any reason not to do it in Rust.
If you get any language outputs "for free", Rust is the way to go.
I've been using Claude to go ridiculously fast in Rust recently. In the pre-LLM years I wrote a lot of Rust, but it definitely was a slow to author language. Claude helps me produce it as fast as I can think. I spend most of my time reviewing the code and making small fixes and refactors. It's great.
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Sometimes I forget programming languages aren't a religion, and then I see someone post stuff like this. Programming languages really do inspire some of us to feel differently.
I would say it's overall the best existing language, probably due to learning from past mistakes. On the whole it wins via the pro/con sum. But ... Still loads of room for improvement! Far from a perfect lang; just edges out the existing alternatives by a bit.
I'd say that it's taking much needed steps to achieve perfection but many more steps are there ahead. The next language closer to perfection would definitely have a much gentler introduction curve, among other things.
Which coding assistant do you think needs a gentle introduction curve?
Needs monads (not joking)
If AI gets sufficiently good what will be the point of rust? I can just whip out some C code, tell the AI to make it safe (or just ask it if the code contains any undefined behavior), done.
Working code talks.
Bullshit walks.
Why not go full functional programming at that point? If the main issue with FP has been accessibility, then it should really take off now.
When you do fully value-oriented programming in Rust (i.e. no interior mutability involved) that's essentially functional programming. There's mutable, ephemeral data involved, but it's always confined to a single well-defined context and never escapes from it. You can even have most of your code base be sans-IO, which is the exact same pattern you'd use in Haskell.
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I wouldn’t because idiomatic Haskell is way slower than idiomatic Rust.
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Isn’t Rust a pretty good functional language? It has most of the features that enable safe, correct code without being anal about immutability and laziness that make performance difficult to predict.
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Rust may be the darling of the moment, but Erlang is oft slept on.
As AI makes human-readable syntax less relevant, the Erlang/Elixir BEAM virtual machine is an ideal compilation target because its "let it crash" isolated process model provides system-level fault tolerance against AI logic errors, arguably more valuable than Rust’s strict memory safety.
The native Actor Model simplifies massive concurrency by eliminating shared state and the complex thread management. BEAM's hot code swapping capability also enables a continuous deployment where an AI can dynamically rewrite and inject optimized functions directly into live applications with zero downtime.
Imagine a future where an LLM is constantly monitoring server performance, profiling execution times, and dynamically rewriting sub-optimal functions in real-time. With Rust, every optimization requires a recompile and a deployment cycle that interrupts the system.
Finally, Erlang's functional immutability makes deterministic AI reasoning easier, while its built-in clustering replaces complex external infrastructure, making it a resilient platform suited for automated iteration.