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Topcoat is pushing the boundary of server applications with Rust

113 points · 100 comments · sagacity

  1. muglug · · focus · HN ↗
    > Rust is the best general-purpose language for the new world of AI-driven development.

    Funny, the Python guys say Python is the best general-purpose language for AI and the Go guys say Go is the best general-purpose language for AI etc etc

    1. Tuna-Fish · · focus · HN ↗
      I've found that the guardrails of a strong, expressive type system are amazing for LLMs, especially if you don't use the top-of-the-line models but stick to the cheaper options. Agents need feedback to do their magic, and the type system is great for that.

      But on the other hand, the compile time of Rust is really counterproductive. On large, established projects, most prompts I write now spend more time compiling on my machine than they spend outputting tokens. In a way this is great because the tokens are the expensive part, but it does mean that when faster LLMs will come, they will not meaningfully improve iteration speed for me.

      I wonder how much of the compile time of Rust is inherent to the type system. There might be room for a language with slower runtime speed (GC?), but as good of a type system as Rust, so long as compile times are much faster. Switching languages has never been easier, anyone have any suggestions? IMO hard requirements are algebraic types and error handling based on them.

      1. stymaar · · focus · HN ↗
        > But on the other hand, the compile time of Rust is really counterproductive.

        Since it's going to be mostly cargo check and incremental builds, I don't think it matters in practice.

        1. selfhoster1312 · · focus · HN ↗
          Even incremental builds can be slow depending on eg. what macros you use. For example, i had bad surprises with askama which is a delight in most cases, but really makes compilation slower as you add more templates. On a project with ~20 templates, incremental build in debug mode now takes ~40s on a very fast machine.
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