Rust is a fantastic language to emit from AI.
Studies report that the language design tends to result in lower defect code (vs peers such as Go and Java) due to how the syntax aids error handling, logic flow, and API design.
You don't need to know Rust to begin using it. You'll learn it quickly enough.
The code is easy to read, and Serde makes parsing, especially JSON, extremely pleasant. Writing HTTP services is a breeze.
AI makes Rust development go 10x faster. The borrow checker isn't even an issue. It's invisible now. You almost never hit it anyway when you write web services, but now it's no issue at all when writing highly concurrent code too. Claude etc. emit the correct code and lifetimes, and it's entirely ergonomic and idiomatic.
The biggest problem with Rust is the compile time.
What study?
And I don't see how Go design patterns would be any worse. The main issue people have with it is the repetition/verbosity, which LLMs handle just fine.
The repetition and verbosity makes it more expensive for the LLM to write. You'd want a language that is expressive and dense if you're optimizing for token usage.
APL would seem to be perfect!
> AI makes Rust development go 10x faster. The borrow checker isn't even an issue. It's invisible now.
What happens when things break and the AI agent can't fix it?
That would be bad, which is why Rust is preferred to python. In Rust when things break the AI gets a clear error message that makes it clear how to fix. In Python when things break, the AI will randomly spin its wheels for days trying different things without being able root cause the issue.
A failure to compile is by far the easiest thing for the AI to fix.
You'll learn Rust faster with AI and should be able to solve it yourself.
You're unlikely to wind up in such a situation though. The design work Claude does in Rust is really sensible and idiomatic, and I really don't think you'll be unable to refactor or redesign things. Claude is extremely good with Rust generation, refactoring, and manipulation.
I'll go as far as to say that AI has removed most of the complaints people had with learning or using Rust. It's not even a speed bump now.
I would imagine this assumes the operator is still familiar with the borrow checker, lifetimes, etc. Otherwise how can the human operator know if what Claude does is actually sane (i.e. it compiles but doesn't do what it actually should)?
Come on now, how do you learn anything if you just tell claude to do something and feed it error messages?
Yeah, I don't think you really learn a language with agentic coding, at least you wont become fluent writing it. I currently use copy pasta chatbot help to write some C code and I am still often stuck how to progress manually. And I refactor a lot because the LLM code is subpar for me.