Defect free. Immaculate types. Safe. Ergonomic. Beautiful to read.
AI is going to be writing a lot of Rust.
The final arguments of "rust is hard to write" are going to quiet down. This makes it even more accessible.
> Defect free.
I am an upstream developer on the Rust Project (lang, library, cargo, others), and obviously a big fan of Rust. This kind of advocacy doesn't help us, and in fact makes our jobs harder, because for some people this kind of advocacy is their main experience of people they assume are representative of Rust. Please take it down a notch.
I think Rust is the best available language for many kinds of problems. Not yet all, but we're always improving it to try to work for more people. It gets better over time. I'd certainly never call it, or almost any other software, "defect free".
And I'd never call it "the final language"; we're building it to last the test of time, and we hope things like the edition system mean that the successor to Rust is a future version of Rust, but things can always change, and we're not the only source of great ideas.
If you genuinely care about Rust, please adjust your advocacy of Rust to avoid hurting Rust and generating negative perceptions of Rust.
For a taste: I wish we didn’t need lifetime annotations, somehow. I wish rust had first class support for self borrows, possibly via explicit syntax indicating that a variable is borrowed, and thus pinned. Unpin breaks my brain, and I wish there were ways to do pin projections without getting a PhD first. I wish for async streams. I wish async executors were in std, and didn’t take so long to compile. I could go on and on.
I feel like there’s an even simpler & more beautiful language hiding inside rust. I can’t quite see it. But I really hope someone else can bring it into the world some day.
I would like all of that as well. I think we can do much of that in Rust. I would love to see self-borrows available, and not just via pinning; I would also like relative pointers. I would like people to almost never have to think about pin or unpin; one of my rules of thumb is that if you see Pin or Poll, you've delved too deep, and nobody should need those to write almost any async code, including the interiors of trait implementations and async runtime implementations. And I would absolutely like to see async iterators, async executors, and many kinds of async traits in the standard library.
I also think there are plenty of things we are unlikely to get to even in an edition, and that might never happen without a completely different language. I'm not sure if we'll find a path to doing those in Rust, or if they will be the domain of some future language that makes different trade-offs.
> > Defect free.
There's a Google talk on the matter. "Defect rate" / "defect free" is a term that is used quite a bit. I've latched onto this, because I find it true. Rust is a far more defect free language on a line by line basis measured and compared to other statically typed languages.
> And I'd never call it "the final language"
I honestly disagree, and I'm sticking to this prediction.
I don't think we're going to be writing code much longer by ourselves. The machines are going to outpace us soon.
Maybe something that's LLM-oriented will take over, but at that point these won't be "human" languages anymore. So I'll revise my claim to "Rust is the last human language".
If I want to serialize my thoughts to code, Rust is the language for it. It's probably the last one I'll be hand-writing or sending my revisions back to the LLM for.
Rust will also be an order of magnitude easier to author, at which point there shouldn't be much holding people back from producing it. If you have a choice between generating Java, C++, Go, or Rust, you're going to pick Rust almost every time unless you have to fit into those other ecosystems.
If you haven't used Claude or Codex with Rust, it's sublime and you should drop what you're doing to try it.
Oh my, there's a new language called Rust? Didn't they know there already is one? The old one is so popular that I can't imagine the nicely readable one to gain any traction whatsoever (even if the old one is an assault on the senses).
I honestly can't tell if this is a humorous attack or not.
Poe's law is validated once again.
It's not the best tool for the job for a lot of things, but if the LLMs make writing it as fast as anything else - whelp, I can't see any reason not to do it in Rust.
If you get any language outputs "for free", Rust is the way to go.
I've been using Claude to go ridiculously fast in Rust recently. In the pre-LLM years I wrote a lot of Rust, but it definitely was a slow to author language. Claude helps me produce it as fast as I can think. I spend most of my time reviewing the code and making small fixes and refactors. It's great.
I used to think that I would never write C code again, but when I decided recently to build something that would run on ESP32 chips, I realized there wasn't any good reason for me to use Rust yet. ESP-IDF is built on C and I can write C code just fine. C compiles quickly, it's a very simple language on the surface, and as long as you minimize the use of dynamic memory allocation and other pitfalls, it's reliable.
It's not, nor is it well informed. People are currently developing languages specifically for use by LLMs.
> It's not the best tool for the job for a lot of things
Then how could it possibly be the final language?
> if the LLMs make writing it as fast as anything else - whelp, I can't see any reason not to do it in Rust
This has nothing to do with the claim that it's the final language.
Bullshit walks.
As AI makes human-readable syntax less relevant, the Erlang/Elixir BEAM virtual machine is an ideal compilation target because its "let it crash" isolated process model provides system-level fault tolerance against AI logic errors, arguably more valuable than Rust’s strict memory safety.
The native Actor Model simplifies massive concurrency by eliminating shared state and the complex thread management. BEAM's hot code swapping capability also enables a continuous deployment where an AI can dynamically rewrite and inject optimized functions directly into live applications with zero downtime.
Imagine a future where an LLM is constantly monitoring server performance, profiling execution times, and dynamically rewriting sub-optimal functions in real-time. With Rust, every optimization requires a recompile and a deployment cycle that interrupts the system.
Finally, Erlang's functional immutability makes deterministic AI reasoning easier, while its built-in clustering replaces complex external infrastructure, making it a resilient platform suited for automated iteration.
We spend quite a lot of time conceptualizing around safe self mod and to build apps that can change at runtime. We ended up using custom Lua VM, type system to catch mistakes, declarative homogenous infrastructure and actor model (erlang inspired).
Actor model provides not just a good isolation but also it's much easier for AI to reason (since most of components are not that large), we already able to use it to write quite complex systems with ease.
Another upside - in actor model you don't really need any of this fluff with cron jobs, queues and etc, all the logic naturally maps to indended architecture, making implementation of agents _very_ easy.
https://wippy.ai/en/tutorials/micro-agi It takes 4-5 files to create mini sandboxed AI agent at top of actor model with ability to modify own toolkit while having system guardails and no access to core filesystem.
