Thread

1. muglug · 1790345200 · 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 · 1790346839 · 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. pjmlp · 1790368537 · focus · HN ↗

         OCaml, Haskell, F#, Standard ML.

         The big difference to Rust is the availability of interpreters, REPL, which can equally load compiled code, and full blown AOT for release builds.

         Rust's problem isn't type system, rather lack of tools.

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