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Comment by mike_hearn

7 hours ago

It's not nearly the perfect language for LLMs and Rust is dramatically harder to read and reason about than Python with types. Other options work better for nearly all apps. I found Kotlin works well:

- Garbage collected so no reasoning tokens or dev cycles are wasted on manual memory management. You say if you're vibe coding you can ignore lifetimes, but in response to a post that says AI can't do a good job and constantly uses escape hatches that lose the benefits of Rust (and can easily make it worse, copying data all over the place is terrible for performance).

- Very fast iteration speed due to JIT, a fast compiler and ability to use precompiled libraries. Rust is slow to compile.

- High level code that reads nearly like English.

- Semantically compatible with Java and Java libs, so lots of code in the training set.

- Unit tests are in separate files from sources. Rust intermixes them, bloating the context window with tests that may not be relevant to the current task.

Then your domain problem you’re trying to solve doesn’t benefit from Rust.

Sounds like your work doesn’t need Rust and that’s ok.

But don’t generalize.

Write a 250k LOC compiler in Python and then get back to me how well LLMs write in Python...

Sure if you want to vibe code a TODO app where it's literally just copying and pasting one it's already seen 10,000 times before, it can do it in Python.