Comment by speedgoose 2 days ago
I am not convinced that anyone would take a working rust project and rewrite it in C. I don’t see any good reason to do so.
When rust will lose popularity, it is going to happen eventually, I would bet it’s in favour of a newer and more promising programming language. Not C.
In those two alone, Java.
There is no reason I would care about borrow checking implementing a compiler, and besides all the tooling, Java also has stuff like ANTRLR and MPS, and naturally Graal is a good playground for compiler backend tooling.
However in general, I would rather look into OCaml, Haskell, F#, Scala.
Graal and Truffle make the JVM look attractive, especially for this case!
I'm not personally a fan of Java, but if I was implementing a compiler, I'd pick a language with GC. There's pretty much no downside to a GC in that context, and it gives you more flexibility when working with graph data structures.
If 'building a programming language' means writing an interpreter or VM, then I can see the attraction of Rust for that case. But writing interpreters and VMs is like 0.0001% of the programming that gets done in the world.
I wouldn't be surprised if that was closer to the truth. A heck of a lot of boring software runs on the JVM. That said, it's a slightly different niche from command line tools.
Rust is the clear winner of the LLM era. With code generation being so effortless, why would you write in any other language?
Beware of too much expectations,
i don't use LLMs, but i've heard people complain current LLMs are not good at writing Rust
Current LLMs are not good at writing any language you actually understand, unless you do so much of the work that you might as well have written the whole program yourself.
They're excellent at doing things I'm not an expert at, though! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
new chips will always have a c compiler available long before anything else
I think Rust has hit critical mass. It's now basically the default choice for something you want to perform well but want to be reasonably secure. For example, uv in the python ecosystem.