[whiatp]

Something I've noticed that I never really see called out is how easy it is to review rust code diffs. I spent a lot of my career maintaining company internal forks of large open source C programs, but recently have been working in rust. The things I spent a lot of time chasing down while reviewing C code diffs, particularly of newer team members, is if they paid attention to all the memory assumptions that were non-local to the change they made. Eg. I'd ask them "the way you called this function implies it _always_ frees the memory behind that char*. Is that the case?" If they didn't know the answer immediately I'd be worried and spend a lot more time investigating the change before approving.

With rust, what I see is generally what I get. I'm not worried about heisenbug gotchas lurking in innocent looking changes. If someone is going to be vibe coding, and truly doesn't care about the language the product ends up in, they might as well do it in a language that has rigid guardrails.

[throwuxiytayq]

How do LLMs deal with Rust (compared to other languages)? I think this might actually be the time to finally give the language a try. LLMs really lowered the barrier for staying productive while learning.

[0xffff2]

This is extremely limited scope annecdata, but I've spent a few tens of hours each testing LLM coding agents in Rust for personal projects and in Python at work. My impression is that LLMs are far more productive in Rust. I attribute this to the far more structured nature of Rust compared to Python, and possibly the excellent compiler error messages as well.

The LLM gets stuck in unproductive loops all the time in Python. In Rust, it generally converges to a result that compiles and passes unit tests. Of course the code quality is still variable. My experience is that it works best when prompts are restricted to a very small unit of work. Asking an LLM to write an entire library/module/application from scratch virtually never results in usable code.

[anuramat]

sometimes they randomly choose the ugliest possible way to do pattern matching, eg multiple blocks of nested "if let" instead of a "match", or a "match" instead of a single "if let"

otherwise, works great; much easier to un-vibe the code compared to eg python

(gpt 5.* in codex/sonnet 4.5 in cc/glm 4.6)