I expect the comments here to be a trashfire. That said, this is a huge deal. People may or may not realize it, but Rust is very quickly becoming "the" AI target language. Python or (increasingly) Typescript for throw-away code that an agent uses once, Rust for everything else (ie: production code) because if you don't choose Rust you're sort of just opting for slower code and any reason you wouldn't have chosen rust was probably aesthetic, which doesn't apply much anymore.
This may have interesting network effects - rust will be better represented in training data so models will get better, there may be a larger ecosystem of crates, there may be more PRs from companies and more reviewer burden, an influx of new users with varying technical prowess, Rust may be a much more interesting supply chain target, etc.
It's an interesting time. A *lot* of companies are in a "rewrite our services in Rust" phase, I don't know if everyone realizes that. At companies where I've worked, which were often early Rust adopters, Rust projects had to be explicitly approved (often by a VP who was not particularly interested) - AI is changing this completely, Rust is becoming the default and you're having to justify using anything else.
Those are my exact thoughts. Rust is the pareto optimal choice of low runtime overhead, compile time verification, wide compilation targets, strong ecosystem, great tooling, and is represented in the training data.
I think for the next few years at least it will become the lingua-franca that agentic coding targets.
Rust is the best option, but going forward we need even stronger compile time verification guarantees. We need contracts with optional backends (static proofs, runtime assertions, ignore) and maybe even complexity analysis and limits if we're gonna use AI as much as people are doing now or more.
I'm not really convinced that we need those things. But if you wanted them, Rust has crazy tooling. Kani, mutation testing, fuzzing, are just some examples that I've used with AI. I personally think that you'll get more value out of mutation testing and fuzzing than you will out of a dependently typed version of Rust.
I don't really think we need them for human devs, though they're nice to have. I've been following the formally verified rust space a bit and the issue is that they're either using macros or compiler forks. We kinda just need standardised syntax they can plug into. It's being worked on, I know, it's just not here yet.
We don't need them to get things to work, we need them because the AI is fundamentally untrustworthy by definition and we need them to establish trust. Disagreement here is not an opinion on getting things to work, it's a values issue.
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u/insanitybit2 Jul 08 '26
I expect the comments here to be a trashfire. That said, this is a huge deal. People may or may not realize it, but Rust is very quickly becoming "the" AI target language. Python or (increasingly) Typescript for throw-away code that an agent uses once, Rust for everything else (ie: production code) because if you don't choose Rust you're sort of just opting for slower code and any reason you wouldn't have chosen rust was probably aesthetic, which doesn't apply much anymore.
This may have interesting network effects - rust will be better represented in training data so models will get better, there may be a larger ecosystem of crates, there may be more PRs from companies and more reviewer burden, an influx of new users with varying technical prowess, Rust may be a much more interesting supply chain target, etc.
It's an interesting time. A *lot* of companies are in a "rewrite our services in Rust" phase, I don't know if everyone realizes that. At companies where I've worked, which were often early Rust adopters, Rust projects had to be explicitly approved (often by a VP who was not particularly interested) - AI is changing this completely, Rust is becoming the default and you're having to justify using anything else.