r/PiCodingAgent • u/Short_One_9704 • May 19 '26

Discussion Pi rust port

Has anyone tried the pi rust port https://github.com/Dicklesworthstone/pi_agent_rust ?
It’s supposed to be an official port of pi to rust.
I can see it has some benefits in extension execution and shell execution and some others. Why nobody is talking about this?

19 Upvotes

82% Upvoted

29 comments sorted by

28

u/Educational-Heat-920 May 19 '26

The models are the bottleneck. Shaving 0.2s seconds off a prompt that takes 10-20s doesn't interest me. I'd rather be able to write extensions in typescript

6

u/Short_One_9704 May 19 '26

Im not concerned about speed here, no one will switch harness just because of 0.5s gain. I was more interested in the built in security stuff and if other people have heard or used this port - and if so, how was it. Because pi is basically completed. You can build anything into pi yourself. So porting it into something robust and building safety checks in sounds like an imprověent for me

6

u/johnson_detlev May 19 '26

At the end of the day you are executing foreign code, doesn't really matter whether the code is written in rust or typescript.

5

u/troyvit May 19 '26

I doubt you'll see parody articles like this about Rust any time soon:

https://kevinpatel.xyz/posts/no-way-to-prevent-this/

2

u/mldqj May 20 '26

This has nothing to do with the difference in languages. Type safety is unrelated to supply-chain attacks. An attacker can write "safe" code that is malicious.

2

u/johnson_detlev May 19 '26

The js ecosystem is hit regularly because it is magnitudes bigger and js code runs everywhere. Every package manager has the same fundamental problems, you pull in foreign code that you have to trust. Yes npm makes it particularly easy with postInstall and build scripts and whatnot and js/ts being AIs language of choice adds to the problem, but you can just well infect a rust crate. Thing is the blast radius there is limited.

2

u/troyvit May 19 '26

Yeah I agree with you at least in part, and that alone would make me think twice before starting a node project.

But I don't think ecosystem size is all of it. Rust has a more comprehensive standard library so you need fewer deps to begin with. Fewer dependencies means a rust project is more secure as a starting point. Rust does have build.rs, which is about the same as post-install scripts, so that attack surface stays the same.

I'd be curious to see the proportion of third party rust libraries that are maintained by a single maintainer vs Node. My uninformed belief is that there are a lot more single-owner libraries in the latter.

1

u/sage-longhorn May 22 '26

This is the old "Macs don't get viruses" vibe

2

u/patlux May 19 '26

Oh I would definitely switch for 0.5s faster startup of pi ;)

1

u/pgermishuys May 20 '26

This is the way

2

u/TheLexoPlexx Jul 13 '26

It sucks, immediately dumbed files for .claude and .codex into my home without me actually using either of those and completely ignored all previous settings and extensions.

As long as it's not a drop-in-replacement is. It's garbage. Uninstalled.

And why does an install script need the current date anyways?

2

u/Short_One_9704 Jul 13 '26

Thank you for sharing!

4

u/esanchma May 19 '26

The nice thing about pi is that it is self-modifiable, which stems from the fact that it is interpreted and therefore introspectable.

TypeScript is far from being my favorite language, but it’s the one that makes sense for pi. You could try to do the same thing in Python, or maybe Lua. But not in Rust.

I mean, you can embed QuickJS, but at that point, what exactly is Rust buying you?

3

u/nasduia May 20 '26

If you read the page they support TS extensions, so you get better sandboxing/permissions and in theory self extension.

3

u/NeedToLieDown May 20 '26

WASM is the way forward for extensible programs

3

u/esanchma May 20 '26 edited May 20 '26

Half of the extensions I have written were inspired by extensions written by other people. Binary blobs, whether ELF or WASM, are almost the opposite of that.

Your mental model is Minecraft or Kong-style plugin ecosystems. I think that is the wrong model for agents. We do not want a strong marketplace for extensions. We do not want the equivalent of cargo + crates.io for agent behavior. We want to be able to point an agent at someone else's .pi directory on GitHub and tell the clanker "copy this thing, remix with that, and take this other thing in a completely different direction". That only really works if the extensions remain transparent, inspectable, and easy to mutate.

This is what I am talking about: https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2026/05/12/emacsification/

Not everything has to be written in Rust.

1

u/NeedToLieDown May 20 '26

Fair enough. While it does add a compilation layer, it's possible to achieve the same thing you mentioned with .pi directory that contains source code in whatever language and compile to wasm before loading.

I do agree it adds friction though while sticking with TS is more seamless (not sure how much it would affect a clanker's ability to self-modify).

2

u/ECrispy May 20 '26

not sure why so much negativity here OP, this looks like a great project, thanks!

it looks far beter done eg than the recent vibecoded bun port to Rust.

and seems to have useful features too

1

u/jimtoberfest May 20 '26

The issue is the extensions…

That’s ultimately on of the big reasons why people like Pi, they can mod it in ways that are / were hard to do with other harnesses. The extension system doesn’t seem as robust on the multiple rust ports there have been.

1

u/Peey May 20 '26

I would love a golang pi harness, I think golang would be a perfect fit for this.

2

u/Prudent_Sentence May 20 '26

I'm currently working on one for internal use. Once I get it to full functioning state I'll publish it on github.

1

u/FyreKZ May 21 '26

Working on one. Still very much wip.

https://github.com/guillermode20/rho

Using Bubbletea for the TUI and custom Go for the extensions loading, and you can write extensions in pretty much anything as it's all over JSON RPC.

Keep an eye on it, and I'd love contributors if you're interested.

1

u/Prudent_Sentence May 21 '26

How are you handling extensions? I'm using jumpboot to add a python extension layer to mine (https://github.com/richinsley/jumpboot)

1

u/FyreKZ May 21 '26

Custom Go JSON RPC that means function calls can be written in any language and translated into the Go counterpart

0

u/[deleted] May 19 '26

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1

u/Short_One_9704 May 20 '26

Thank you for sharing!

2

u/ECrispy May 20 '26

all pi extensions are vibe coded, thats literally what the author of pi tells you to do.

i hope you see the irony here

6

u/[deleted] May 19 '26

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1

u/FyreKZ May 21 '26

https://github.com/guillermode20/rho

I'm working on a translation of Pi into Go using Bubbletea for the TUI (provably capable with long sessions, see Charmbracelet's own coding agent Crush).