Comment by bottlepalm
14 hours ago
For me the bottleneck now is reading/reviewing code, not writing code. As you said, AI makes it way easier to write, but do you not review the code? And isn't a verbose, cryptic language with lots of nitty gritty memory management not harder to read/review?
I'm not sold on Rust being a great language to use with AI unless the reason to use it is a lot more than just Rust being fashionable.
I find Go harder to review than Rust.
The verbose error handling diluting the interesting parts is one thing, but the main issue is the weak type system. Having to read the callee's code to check if it deviates from `res xor err`, or if it mutates its arguments. Figuring out which interface that `func (o *Obj) ()` is implementing, if any. Dealing with documentation that is a wall of 100 disappointing oneliners all repeating the function name.
Rust is information-dense and takes longer to master, but it's not inherently cryptic, there's a finite amount of things to know. Memory management sometimes take a bit of thought to write, but it's straightforward to review, you can trust it's correct if it compiles, you just keep an eye out for optimizations.
I don't see the difference in exploring an dense custom type system versus a flatter one. Both force you to look things up when you don't know about them.
In my opinion these problems originate in architectural style. Much of the open source written today is designed to impress the audience instead of focusing on the problem.
In my experience, Rust is only mildly unpleasant to review, if only because the GitHub PR review interface is not an IDE. It can be hard to tell why .as_ref()s and whatnot had to be used without being able to hover over a variable to see its type. This is probably because of the language's preference for type inference, though personally I would rather that than having to skim over explicit types.
Compared to Rust, Go as a language requires a lot more effort to review. You have to be on the lookout for basic gotchas like not checking if a pointer is nil, placing `defer` in the wrong place, using a result when err isn't nil, and so on. Plus, diffs are messier because unused variables are a compilation error, and _, err := can change into _, err = solely due to new lines above.
And := not being = can really matter for variable shadowing.
Absolutely insane syntax choice in a language where everything returns 2 values. At least do var:, err: =
It's the same logic for human and for AI code: In Rust the compiler catches many bugs so you don't have to.
If the LLM gives you safe code you know there are entire classes of things you don't have to review for.
That said, I agree with you. My experience is that LLMs are great if you are highly competent in the domain in which you let them work. And it's probably easier to be competent in Go than in Rust.
Safe? No compiler is going to catch badly designed code, or intentionally backdoored code. Memory leaks as well. Compilers are the ground floor of validation and the least of your problems with AI generated code.
Yes? Does that contradict anything I said?
A mythical compiler might catch unsafe code
I found it's the opposite. Thanks to LLM's whole classes of problems otherwise solved by using Rust are gone. It's now more important that the generated code is easy to read.
The build time and space for rust is awful for fast iteration e.g change a thing, verify.
Reading the code? Who has the time.
Aah, I am sure the chickens of vibe coded origin, will never come to roost.
Time isn't the constraint here, but ability. Someone complaining about how hard Rust is to write is probably not capable of reviewing Rust code very well.
The usual reaction or opinion from e.g. good C++ programmers switching to Rust is that the added guardrails and expressivity are great and make things easier.
I find it easier to review Rust (but Go too) than to write it.
IMO neither Go nor Rust are great for reading/reviewing code.
Go is too verbose and the type system isn't expressive enough. Rust code is littered with little memory management details and it requires tons of third party libraries.
I think coding agents will eventually be able to get the low level details right on their own. Reviewers should be able to focus on architecture, design and logic mistakes.
I also think we need a high level formal specification language to tell agents what we expect them to do.
> I also think we need a high level formal specification language to tell agents what we expect them to do.
Let’s make that specification Turing complete while at it.
Jokes aside, IMO it will be a good natural progression. Specify the problem statement in LLM specification, generate the code in Go/Rust whatever is the language of your choice and review the generated code to make sure it adheres to the architecture/design principles that you have set.
It absolutely should be Turing complete. I want to formally specify some constraints/invariants that any generated code has to meet, like very high level test cases.
It doesn't have to be a new language. I'm sure some existing language can be used to create a DSL that serves this purpose.
It can obviously never be complete. Some parts of the spec will always have to be natural language if we want to make the best use of LLMs.
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The benefit is if you lean heavily on types then successful compilation is a massive indicator in the feedback loop. Using stop hooks to ensure successful compilation after every iteration is a game changer. Go also has compilation of course but because the type system is so much more robust in Rust the compilation guarantees so much more about the behaviour of your program. You end up just code reviewing the shape and flow of data.
Code compiling is really the lowest bar of code validation, and doesn't say much of anything of the code running correctly. AI will pump out the most convoluted, over engineered, and at the same time sloppy code if you let it - and it will all compile fine.
Yes, but all else being equal it is a higher bar in Rust than in Go. There are fewer things left for the human to check after a clean build+lint in Rust than in Go. The issue of over-engineered AI output is orthogonal to that.
Overengineering and convoluted code stand out when reading. The hard part are the subtle errors. And the Rust compiler helps you out a lot more here
It's the lowest bar and that's precisely why you want it to be as high as possible.
For me, one of the bigger complaints is that Rust isn't pedantic enough. Panic free Rust isn't taken seriously enough as an idea.
I wish it would catch even more things, since it works so well.