I use LLMs and rust and compile times are absolutely a significant area of degradation. I love rust, I think it's the best language for LLMs, but the biggest win Rust could get for agentic development is to speed up the compiler.
Neither of you talk about what sort of machine you're sitting on. Back when I used a netbook, I'd agree with you, for developing quick off programs, the compile times are horrible. But as someone on a workstation now, compilation times are the least of my problems, and disk space is more of a concern for me.
You also don't share what LLM you use, some of them reason a lot, some of them nothing, some a bit. Again, personally I use LLMs with their maximum reasoning always, trading quality for speed/waiting every single time, and even compiling the Linux kernel would be faster than most LLM responses I get nowadays, for me, on a workstation.
The type system is great and gives extremely fast feedback. The performance wins are also incredible, it just feels like you're throwing 100s of megabytes of RAM away and 10x latency when you don't choose rust now, and for little reason. The testing tooling is really solid - property testing, fuzzing, mutation testing, etc, is all easy to use. Code structure with nice abstractions that don't become spaghetti is nice (traits, enums, etc). Static binaries as a production artifact is really nice. Supply chain story is pretty solid with cargo-vet.
It's hard to come up with anything where I think Rust isn't "best in class" other than compile times.
i think rusts composition is problematic. you can have two abstractions that if you mix them the outcomes are not what you expect unless you have a deep understanding of the details, (e.g. clone/iter) and rust is all about hiding details from you.
I really couldn't disagree more. Rust doesn't hide those details at all. APIs tend to be extremely explicit. I have never run into the issue you're describing in rust, I have run into it far more in other languages where mutability and sharing are implicit.
Comments
I use LLMs and rust and compile times are absolutely a significant area of degradation. I love rust, I think it's the best language for LLMs, but the biggest win Rust could get for agentic development is to speed up the compiler.
Neither of you talk about what sort of machine you're sitting on. Back when I used a netbook, I'd agree with you, for developing quick off programs, the compile times are horrible. But as someone on a workstation now, compilation times are the least of my problems, and disk space is more of a concern for me.
You also don't share what LLM you use, some of them reason a lot, some of them nothing, some a bit. Again, personally I use LLMs with their maximum reasoning always, trading quality for speed/waiting every single time, and even compiling the Linux kernel would be faster than most LLM responses I get nowadays, for me, on a workstation.
I'm on an M4 Macbook. I use Codex, gpt, and Claude in various configurations, including Fable, xhigh, medium, high, ultracode, etc.
because of the type system? i work in ~dynamically typed language and the llms almost never make a type error.
The type system is great and gives extremely fast feedback. The performance wins are also incredible, it just feels like you're throwing 100s of megabytes of RAM away and 10x latency when you don't choose rust now, and for little reason. The testing tooling is really solid - property testing, fuzzing, mutation testing, etc, is all easy to use. Code structure with nice abstractions that don't become spaghetti is nice (traits, enums, etc). Static binaries as a production artifact is really nice. Supply chain story is pretty solid with cargo-vet.
It's hard to come up with anything where I think Rust isn't "best in class" other than compile times.
i think rusts composition is problematic. you can have two abstractions that if you mix them the outcomes are not what you expect unless you have a deep understanding of the details, (e.g. clone/iter) and rust is all about hiding details from you.
I really couldn't disagree more. Rust doesn't hide those details at all. APIs tend to be extremely explicit. I have never run into the issue you're describing in rust, I have run into it far more in other languages where mutability and sharing are implicit.
the existence of iter is to hide implementation detsils from you.
I don't understand what you mean at all. Iter is just a trait. There's nothing special about it.