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(lemmy.nz)
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this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2026
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I'm a professional software engineer writing Rust for many years now.
Honestly, I am very happy that AI is using Rust. Much better that AI uses Rust than Python! If you think AI written Rust is bad, you have no idea how sloppy AI written Python is.
Rust is a great language. Turns out the same stuff that makes it great for humans also makes it great for agents. This is not a bad thing, this is a win-win.
Historically, Rust's biggest disadvantage has been how hard the language is to write and how much you sometimes need to fight the compiler. This disadvantage is quite effectively mitigated by AI, since you can let the AI fight the compiler and write most of the code. So you get all the advantages that Rust brings with basically none of the downsides.
I'm just happy that Rust was invented before LLMs. If Rust did not exist before LLMs, the code the AIs would be writing would be a lot worse.
Hope that answers it.
We understand you perfectly well; Rust is fine, too, but no language can take the place of C. I mean, wouldn't it have been better if it had been written in C?
Why do you say that? I definitely think Rust can take the place of C. Not just can actually, I'd go as far as to say that Rust should take the place of C. C is much too unsafe to be used in today's age. There's really no excuse to use a memory unsafe language today if you're starting something new.
It would not have been better if it was written in C. Rust is just as fast and much better.
While my comment is about c++, not c, I did learn about one use case where rust is strictly worse than c++. Unbelievably low latency applications. Such as software that trades stocks. The way it's implemented, is by sharing memory addresses across code intentionally having the same address written to and read from across threads. Something rust is sort of designed to not support.
It's the only use case I know of where that's true.
I don't know where you've heard this, but none of it is true. Rust is definitely used for low-latency trading, and that's actually one place where it really shines.
C++ does not "support" that either. C++ will let you write that code, but if you write code like that in C++, it's undefined behavior and trust me, no low-latency trading firm wants undefined behavior in their trading software (just imagine what could go wrong...).
Rust helps you avoid such issues. However, Rust definitely "supports" undefined behavior in the exact same way. If you want to share mutable pointers across threads and you don't give a crap about undefined behavior... I mean, that's really, really stupid but you can just write
unsafeand then you can do exactly what you can do in C++ as well.It's largely based on this video: https://youtu.be/QNPwKMOQIKM
Which has a quite complete list of sources.
I actually like Rust too, and I’m not against it; however, C is currently the best-known programming language in the world. Still, I like your idea.
By what metric? It's certainly not the most popular language. I don't think it's the most famous language either. Probably more people have heard of Python than C.
Let me ask a question, then: why were the Linux kernel and the Linux ecosystem written in C rather than Python? No matter what other language you might consider, nothing can truly take the place of C; if you are a software developer, you should already know this.
... because C is a systems langauge that you can use to build a kernel? While Python is an interpreted runtime that cannot target bare-metal?
Rust can easily take the place of C, as Rust can also target bare-metal. It can do everything that C can do (perhaps aside from compiling to some very esoteric platforms). The reason Linux is written in C is cause C was the best option at the time, not because C is some magical language that can do stuff that no other language can.
Also, just because Linux was written in C doesn't mean it is the best-known, most famous or most widely used language. Python is much more well-known and widely used than C.
There’s no need to argue; if that’s what you say, then so be it, my friend. I’m not trying to start a debate about which language is "better"—I’m simply pointing out which one is more comprehensive. Anyway, have it your way.
@SorteKanin
Who asked such a silly question?
Seems you don't see the full chain of replies on your Mastodon instance. Not sure why
@SorteKanin
Appearently not.. Odd its fosstodon.
How does "written in C" make something better?
People used to say the same things about the Linux kernel, but its current state is actually quite good. In other words, C is a standard and robust language.
C is older than Linux. Rust is inside Linux.