What do you mean by “these days”? To me, it seems like rust is a pretty constant factor on HN for at least two years now.
replyIt feels to me like Rust has been pretty big on HN ever since the 1.0 release in 2015...
replyMost of the platforms were successfully petitioned to have rust sdk mandatory added so that rust code can be added to the platforms. The previously situation was rust was not allowed because the external dependency of the rust sdk was blocked.
replyNote that the rust having no stable api is not fixed, so I think there's a bunch of internal systems on each platform to hard lock the rust dependencies across multiple rust users.
There's some friction between platform packagers and the code that the author wrote exactly as it was written.
there has been a few adopters of rust... linux formally choosing it for some of their systems being the most notable recently(maybe a few months ago).
replyAI has made it exceptionally easy to program with.
replyI've switched to using Rust from Python simply because of AI development
Indeed. With AI lifting legacy code bases into Rust got a whole lot easier, and purging the blight of C from the world, excepting the most deeply embedded of applications, got a whole lot closer.
replyReally? You think AI writes better Rust than Python? Can you give me some examples? I strictly code Django, and Claude Code is really good at following my lead with it.
replyRust has a very strict type system and an ecosystem that often utilizes the type system well.
replyMany things that would only be caught at runtime in other languages are caught at compile time in Rust, making coding agents iterate until things compile and work well.
Rust also has great error messages, which help the agents in fixing compilation errors.
The compile errors are great. I can change one function signature and have my output fill up with compile errors (that would all be runtime errors in python). Then I just let claude cook on fixing them. Any time you have to run your program and tell claude what’s wrong with it you’re wasting time, but because claude can run the compiler itself and iterate it’s much more able to complete a task without intervention.
replyI can't give you examples, but my experience is that AI does very well with Rust except for cases where a library has a constantly changing API/ has had recent breaking changes. I find that AI does extremely well at "picking up" a Rust codebase, I suspect due to the type information providing context but I couldn't say.
replyI think relative to the typical Rust code it likely does worse than AI relative to the typical Python code. But due to the compiler, it's possible you might get more correctness out of AI-generated rust code on average.
replyI think the argument is more that working rust code is better than working Python, and AI assistance makes it more tenable for average developers to successfully produce working rust code, and in particular is helpful for navigating the gap between "code written" and "code compiling" (eg why is the borrow checked mad at me).
replyEven if it writes the same or even somewhat worse rust than python, assuming the output is the same you are likely to get a speedup + a better distribution story.
reply