14 ms·

I used to like rust, but I feel like I’m being Pavlovian-conditioned to recoil at its mention now.

by mjhay 2mo ago

Krutonium 2mo ago
I still like it. People are having fun playing with their toy and tool. I have no problem with that.
- fsckboy 2mo ago
  People are having fun with AI coding, and I have no problem with that, but I am sick of hearing about it.
- mjhay 2mo ago
  I shouldn’t have been so negative. I still very much like Rust, but hearing about these AI rewrites constantly is tiresome.
  - willx86 2mo ago
    I'd prefer reading about a rust rewrite then a saas paas CMS integration web thing on the latest framework It'll probably go nowhere, but it's cool to see people test the limits of what they can do and I can't watch without spending a penny Kinda like jackass, fascinating to watch but damn I do not want to do it
  - Dylan16807 2mo ago
    That's fair but you don't get that across very well with a comment that mentions Rust and doesn't mention AI.
minimaxir 2mo ago
Of all the tools in software engineering to be overpopular and overused, Rust is an instance where that is a very good thing. Atleast people aren't AI rewriting things into PHP.
- vlod 2mo ago
  Be careful, that sounds almost like a dare...
block_dagger 2mo ago
I have the opposite feeling; I am liking Rust more and more and thinking most of the world's C code should be rewritten. It seems like a sweet spot of enforced memory safety, performance, and human/agent readability.
- skor 2mo ago
  why rewrite if you can check for and fix bugs? If you are thinking of AI fixing bugs is less expensive
  - ImaCake 2mo ago
    I guess ask the bun people why they translated from zig to rust. I think it was essentially because rust guarantees a set of bugs can't exist so over medium to long term timeframes you end up with less technical debt.
    - krater23 2mo ago
      I know the answer, because they get their money from AI bros and it's a really good headline.
      - ImaCake 2mo ago
        This isn't a helpful reply, I come here for thoughtful discussion, not knee-jerk reactions.
  - minimaxir 2mo ago
    Memory bugs are unknown unknowns that AI may or may not catch. There's net-present-value in switching to a language where certain types of memory bugs are impossible.
    - otterley 2mo ago
      On the contrary, AI agents are doing an outstanding job of catching and fixing them. The jury's still out on the cost-to-value ratio of improving existing code vs. rewriting it.
Aurornis 2mo ago
This is Linux 0.11 from 1991. Someone is having fun with a side experiment that has no practical real-world implications. This stuff is supposed to be fun and we should celebrate when other people are doing fun, pointless things like this. If you're interested then ignore it and move on. There's no need to get involved or comment if a project of no consequence is uninteresting to you personally
- egorfine 2mo ago
  Someone recently had a fun side experiment [1] that ended up killing a product. [1] https://bun.sh/blog/bun-in-rust https://bun.sh/blog/bun-in-rust
  - Attummm 2mo ago
    Well you have our attention, could you explain the backstory?
    - Aurornis 2mo ago
      Bun was originally written in Zig. It was one of the Zig language’s flagship projects that was brought up everywhere as an example of a successful Zig project, alongside Tiger Beetle and Ghostty. The Bun team did an experiment to have an LLM transliterate the codebase to Rust and then iterate on turning it into idiomatic Rust. They were losing a lot of time dealing with memory management problems and wanted to move to a language with more memory safety built in rather than Zig’s very manual cleanup, which is challenging in a project like Bun that is dealing with running another language. The Bun team posted a small blog post about the migration with technical details about how they’re doing it, along with some thanks to the Zig team and positive notes about Zig. The Zig language creator posted a blog post where he ranted about the Bun creator writing “slop before LLMs” and being a “stinky manager” according to “juicy grapes” he heard through the grapevine and numerous other attacks. It was an emotionally charged response to one of the language’s flagship projects leaving for another language. This split the community, or at least became divisive for a lot of people who have no interest in Bun but view the fight as a proxy for some other battle like hating LLMs or Rust. It didn’t actually kill the project. The team was acquired by Anthropic and it (the Rust version) is being used in their products, so it’s actually running everywhere and doing more than ever. There was a poll on some subreddit that showed only 30% of people were going to keep using it after the rewrite and people keep holding this up as evidence that the project is dead.
treyd 2mo ago
Can you elaborate on what causes that reaction specifically?
- IshKebab 2mo ago
  It's pretty much the standard target for slop now, so now "in Rust" kind of implies "I just pointed Claude at it and have no idea if the result is any good, also it's an abandoned project." Tbh I think Rust is popular and mainstream enough that it doesn't matter too much. There are still plenty of great Rust projects out there.
  - Tade0 2mo ago
    Truly, is that Rust's fault that sloppers are targeting it? Personally I'm becoming increasingly disillusioned with current LLMs' capabilities. All those recent high profile "rewrites" turned out to be transliterations to unsafe Rust. I could rewrite anything in unsafe Rust like right now, despite being a novice in the language.
    - IshKebab 2mo ago
      That's not quite true. I had a look into the Bun port and it's not like c2rust where it literally will convert every pointer access into `unsafe` and 50% of your code will be `unsafe`. It's a lot safer than that. They claim only 4% of lines are unsafe, and 78% of those are from C/C++ interop. That's more than a typical Rust project but it's still a lot less than C/C++ or Zig. > I could rewrite anything in unsafe Rust like right now, despite being a novice in the language. I really doubt that. Unsafe Rust is actually significantly more difficult to get right than C or C++. See e.g. https://chadaustin.me/2024/10/intrusive-linked-list-in-rust/ https://chadaustin.me/2024/10/intrusive-linked-list-in-rust/ or https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2022/1/30/unsafe-rust/ https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2022/1/30/unsafe-rust/ It's not too big of a deal because in idiomatic Rust you pretty much never write unsafe code (except for FFI), but it would be nice if it was not quite so hard (or poorly defined).
    - overfeed 2mo ago
      > Truly, is that Rust's fault that sloppers are targeting it? The "Rewrite it in Rust!", all gas, no brakes zealotry predates LLM coding agents. When you dismiss the trade-offs with no consideration, and abide no questions about the possible cost of the "one true $X", you're practicing religion, not engineering. What has changed is the zealots no longer restricted to demanding that other people adapt their preferred language, but can now automate forking projects into their ideal language. I'm hoping the next shoe to drop is the realization that the language is a small part of a projects success, when it's time to maintain their forks.

I used to like rust, but I feel like I’m being Pavlovian-conditioned to recoil at its mention now.

by mjhay 2mo ago

I used to like rust, but I feel like I’m being Pavlovian-conditioned to recoil at its mention now.

Krutonium 2mo ago

I still like it. People are having fun playing with their toy and tool. I have no problem with that.

fsckboy 2mo ago
People are having fun with AI coding, and I have no problem with that, but I am sick of hearing about it.
mjhay 2mo ago
I shouldn’t have been so negative. I still very much like Rust, but hearing about these AI rewrites constantly is tiresome.
- willx86 2mo ago
  I'd prefer reading about a rust rewrite then a saas paas CMS integration web thing on the latest framework It'll probably go nowhere, but it's cool to see people test the limits of what they can do and I can't watch without spending a penny Kinda like jackass, fascinating to watch but damn I do not want to do it
- Dylan16807 2mo ago
  That's fair but you don't get that across very well with a comment that mentions Rust and doesn't mention AI.

minimaxir 2mo ago

Of all the tools in software engineering to be overpopular and overused, Rust is an instance where that is a very good thing. Atleast people aren't AI rewriting things into PHP.

vlod 2mo ago
Be careful, that sounds almost like a dare...

block_dagger 2mo ago

I have the opposite feeling; I am liking Rust more and more and thinking most of the world's C code should be rewritten. It seems like a sweet spot of enforced memory safety, performance, and human/agent readability.

skor 2mo ago
why rewrite if you can check for and fix bugs? If you are thinking of AI fixing bugs is less expensive
- ImaCake 2mo ago
  I guess ask the bun people why they translated from zig to rust. I think it was essentially because rust guarantees a set of bugs can't exist so over medium to long term timeframes you end up with less technical debt.
  - krater23 2mo ago
    I know the answer, because they get their money from AI bros and it's a really good headline.
    - ImaCake 2mo ago
      This isn't a helpful reply, I come here for thoughtful discussion, not knee-jerk reactions.
- minimaxir 2mo ago
  Memory bugs are unknown unknowns that AI may or may not catch. There's net-present-value in switching to a language where certain types of memory bugs are impossible.
  - otterley 2mo ago
    On the contrary, AI agents are doing an outstanding job of catching and fixing them. The jury's still out on the cost-to-value ratio of improving existing code vs. rewriting it.

Aurornis 2mo ago

This is Linux 0.11 from 1991. Someone is having fun with a side experiment that has no practical real-world implications. This stuff is supposed to be fun and we should celebrate when other people are doing fun, pointless things like this. If you're interested then ignore it and move on. There's no need to get involved or comment if a project of no consequence is uninteresting to you personally

egorfine 2mo ago
Someone recently had a fun side experiment [1] that ended up killing a product. [1] https://bun.sh/blog/bun-in-rust https://bun.sh/blog/bun-in-rust
- Attummm 2mo ago
  Well you have our attention, could you explain the backstory?
  - Aurornis 2mo ago
    Bun was originally written in Zig. It was one of the Zig language’s flagship projects that was brought up everywhere as an example of a successful Zig project, alongside Tiger Beetle and Ghostty. The Bun team did an experiment to have an LLM transliterate the codebase to Rust and then iterate on turning it into idiomatic Rust. They were losing a lot of time dealing with memory management problems and wanted to move to a language with more memory safety built in rather than Zig’s very manual cleanup, which is challenging in a project like Bun that is dealing with running another language. The Bun team posted a small blog post about the migration with technical details about how they’re doing it, along with some thanks to the Zig team and positive notes about Zig. The Zig language creator posted a blog post where he ranted about the Bun creator writing “slop before LLMs” and being a “stinky manager” according to “juicy grapes” he heard through the grapevine and numerous other attacks. It was an emotionally charged response to one of the language’s flagship projects leaving for another language. This split the community, or at least became divisive for a lot of people who have no interest in Bun but view the fight as a proxy for some other battle like hating LLMs or Rust. It didn’t actually kill the project. The team was acquired by Anthropic and it (the Rust version) is being used in their products, so it’s actually running everywhere and doing more than ever. There was a poll on some subreddit that showed only 30% of people were going to keep using it after the rewrite and people keep holding this up as evidence that the project is dead.

treyd 2mo ago

Can you elaborate on what causes that reaction specifically?

IshKebab 2mo ago
It's pretty much the standard target for slop now, so now "in Rust" kind of implies "I just pointed Claude at it and have no idea if the result is any good, also it's an abandoned project." Tbh I think Rust is popular and mainstream enough that it doesn't matter too much. There are still plenty of great Rust projects out there.
- Tade0 2mo ago
  Truly, is that Rust's fault that sloppers are targeting it? Personally I'm becoming increasingly disillusioned with current LLMs' capabilities. All those recent high profile "rewrites" turned out to be transliterations to unsafe Rust. I could rewrite anything in unsafe Rust like right now, despite being a novice in the language.
  - IshKebab 2mo ago
    That's not quite true. I had a look into the Bun port and it's not like c2rust where it literally will convert every pointer access into `unsafe` and 50% of your code will be `unsafe`. It's a lot safer than that. They claim only 4% of lines are unsafe, and 78% of those are from C/C++ interop. That's more than a typical Rust project but it's still a lot less than C/C++ or Zig. > I could rewrite anything in unsafe Rust like right now, despite being a novice in the language. I really doubt that. Unsafe Rust is actually significantly more difficult to get right than C or C++. See e.g. https://chadaustin.me/2024/10/intrusive-linked-list-in-rust/ https://chadaustin.me/2024/10/intrusive-linked-list-in-rust/ or https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2022/1/30/unsafe-rust/ https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2022/1/30/unsafe-rust/ It's not too big of a deal because in idiomatic Rust you pretty much never write unsafe code (except for FFI), but it would be nice if it was not quite so hard (or poorly defined).
  - overfeed 2mo ago
    > Truly, is that Rust's fault that sloppers are targeting it? The "Rewrite it in Rust!", all gas, no brakes zealotry predates LLM coding agents. When you dismiss the trade-offs with no consideration, and abide no questions about the possible cost of the "one true $X", you're practicing religion, not engineering. What has changed is the zealots no longer restricted to demanding that other people adapt their preferred language, but can now automate forking projects into their ideal language. I'm hoping the next shoe to drop is the realization that the language is a small part of a projects success, when it's time to maintain their forks.