> Argon agents are working on migrating C/C++ codebases to Rust across Google
Man, I remember back in the days when the cppnext team was refusing to even consider Rust, instead looking at absurd stuff like Carbon and Swift (!), even though half of the engineering staff already knew where this was headed. I hope they got a few good promos out of the delays at least.
There is 0 practicality in inventing an entirely new coding language that only one company uses, and you have to teach it to thousands of new engineers. Rust exists and fits the job totally fine and is used in more places and has actual support outside of a single entity (i.e you can actually hire people that feasibly know the language).
It was clearly done because some PL guys at google really wanted to make a new cool language and Google was the perfect place to incubate it without it getting axed. Probably got a couple of promos out of it too. This is clearly not the best use of time or money, but I guess if you're google you have so much of both it probably doesn't really make a dent, and you can keep a few very smart people happy with shiny new projects.
Also, LLMs being used for a large portion of coding nowadays sort of remove the need for these types of languages, IMO. They make less "silly" bugs (both logical and structural) that languages like this are meant to catch, and they are much better at languages that are better represented in the training corpus. This somewhat obviates the need for very niche "type/dummy-safe" languages like carbon (and even rust/zig, imo). So even if you did want to use Carbon, you'd likely have to bootstrap a decent amount of your own "good" carbon code to post train an LLM, and even then, it likely won't have that big of a gain vs just having an LLM write C++ or even Rust. If you are a company that still reviews code, you should just have an LLM code in a language most people can understand anyway to make verifiability tractable.
Hmm, I don't disagree with you that LLM's remove the need for type-safe languages, but as the blog mentioned, Google is porting their C++/C code to rust. Does this mean the port is waste of time and that they should just rely on the LLM's to catch memory errors?
actually, not my conclusion, just paraphrasing what Boshalfoshal was saying. In fact, am also questioning whether this is true, but personally haven't done development enough with LLM's to make my own determination:)
tazjin · · focus · HN ↗
Man, I remember back in the days when the cppnext team was refusing to even consider Rust, instead looking at absurd stuff like Carbon and Swift (!), even though half of the engineering staff already knew where this was headed. I hope they got a few good promos out of the delays at least.
vovavili · · focus · HN ↗
boshalfoshal · · focus · HN ↗
It was clearly done because some PL guys at google really wanted to make a new cool language and Google was the perfect place to incubate it without it getting axed. Probably got a couple of promos out of it too. This is clearly not the best use of time or money, but I guess if you're google you have so much of both it probably doesn't really make a dent, and you can keep a few very smart people happy with shiny new projects.
Also, LLMs being used for a large portion of coding nowadays sort of remove the need for these types of languages, IMO. They make less "silly" bugs (both logical and structural) that languages like this are meant to catch, and they are much better at languages that are better represented in the training corpus. This somewhat obviates the need for very niche "type/dummy-safe" languages like carbon (and even rust/zig, imo). So even if you did want to use Carbon, you'd likely have to bootstrap a decent amount of your own "good" carbon code to post train an LLM, and even then, it likely won't have that big of a gain vs just having an LLM write C++ or even Rust. If you are a company that still reviews code, you should just have an LLM code in a language most people can understand anyway to make verifiability tractable.
computerdork · · focus · HN ↗
tclancy · · focus · HN ↗
That feels like a really strong conclusion. I’m not clear on why any safeguard isn’t a useful safeguard if you let agents write all the code.
computerdork · · focus · HN ↗