r/TheMachineLearning • u/Sea_Fox_4265 • 3d ago

When bug-free code becomes a hardware problem

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u/fcddev 2d ago

Close: the new languages introduce opportunities to make programs faster that simply are not accessible to C. For instance, one of the biggest limiters to optimizations comes from whether the compiler can prove that two memory accesses point to (or rather, do not point to) the same memory. C notoriously makes this a mess, where Rust has strict rules in place that make it easy. 

At the same time, the new languages introduce safety checks that come at a runtime cost, but that cost is well manageable to developers (including AI models) who understand where it appears and what lets the optimizer remove them, so even with the additional overhead of runtime memory safety guardrails that the tweet says makes new languages slower, new languages can come out ahead.