Ooo interesting, I didn’t know that!

Rust is pretty great in almost all domains. The only ones where I think Python is a sensible choice are research, where a REPL is really useful (think Jupyter).

There are plenty of things that are “scripting”, i.e. ad-hoc admin of other projects that aren’t actually Python projects, where you want to share code between multiple scripts.

Rust has scripting support. It’s nightly only but that’s not actually a big deal since running nightly is trivial.

It has some limitations currently, but… so does Python.

Pairwise ranking is definitely better than stars, but nobody wants to read your slop, sorry.

Google shows there are lots of these already: Flickchart, Canonova (slop), moup.app (also slop), popcornlist (possibly slop but they at least wrote their own prose so they get a pass, though it is an iPhone app only), pairckle (generic pairwise ranking, not slop!)

Also it doesn’t sound like you have figured out how to actually do the ranking yet. Look up Bradley-Terry or TrueSkill.

As usually, the difficult bit is getting users.

Just because import works different in the language than the ones you like, does not mean the language is crap.

No, it means it’s unsuitable for scripting, if you need anything more than a single file. Better than Bash of course (not hard).

Why bother with the significant pain of FFI when you can just write the whole thing in Rust?

Also “the critical parts” is mostly a myth. After a small amount of optimisation, the vast majority of programs do not have nice isolated hotspots.

Python may be a grown up language but it’s still a pretty awful language for ad-hoc scripting. It really wants to believe that you only use it for writing Python projects damnit! You can beat it into submission, but as soon as you start typing import in a situation that isn’t a nice pure Python package it will say “whatchulookinatmate? Youwannafight?”

Don’t believe me? Explain how relative imports work.

Assuming that’s a genuine question…

AI needs feedback just the same as humans. I would think of AI like a human that’s of average cleverness, but has a huge breadth of knowledge and basically infinite time and patience. They are going to be decent at assembly but they’re still going to make mistakes just like humans.

Using a language like Rust that has a lot of static correctness checks gives a higher quality result for AI, just like it does for humans.

Yeah anyway with AI why would you use Python for a new project? I just do everything in Rust now, including simple scripts.

Unfortunately there’s a lot of existing Python code.

None of those have been successful for various reasons (I think primarily because they all sound like they’d be a total nightmare to set up and maintain).

As soon as uv provides an alternative implementation so you can just run uv run --but-fast I think it will become popular.

I would not be at all surprised if they are secretly working on a faster Python implementation. They own all of the non-shit Python tooling, they have unlimited tokens now, they aren’t afraid of vibe coding. Why not?

I am eagerly waiting for someone to vibe code a version of Python that isn’t shit. Probably not far off I expect.

Classic environmentalists making the acceptable the enemy of the clearly worse.

But in any case underwater data centres make zero sense. If you weren’t already convinced by using your brain for 5 seconds, Microsoft proved this a decade or two ago.

If you want easy access to seawater just build it on the coast. There’s a reason nuclear power stations are built on the coast and not underwater!

When we think about fascism we often do that by looking at the actors: Evil individuals doing evil things for evil reasons.

“Sophisticated” “analysis”…

Clearly not, because people still have their culture and heritage. Theft requires taking something so that the victim no longer has it.

At least that was the dubious moral justification of pirates back in the day. (Not saying I don’t pirate, I just never justified it through word games.)

AI is built on massive data theft

Where are all the “copyright infringment isn’t theft” people now lol…

If you didn’t use a profiler, then how can you be sure that the issue was Python and not something else?

It was a relatively simple program and I am good at programming.

The point is, I put the same amount of effort into writing the same program in Python and Rust, and Rust was 50x faster. With AI, I don’t see any reason to use Python these days anyway. I never bought the productivity arguments before (Rust is easily as productive as Python), but with AI Rust is definitely more productive than Python because of the much stronger static checks.

Did you use a profiler to find the bottlenecks?

No. It was a simple enough program that there were no areas for improvement anyway. I also did not use a profiler for the Rust code.

good Python devs know how to find bottlenecks in their software and replace them with fast implementations

In my experience this is also a sweet sounding lie to make people feel ok with using Python. Yes in some case you make a big mistake and there’s a large bottleneck you can easily remove… Or your program has a nice small hotspot where it spends most of its time and you can just write that bit in C++ (AI is the obvious example).

But most programs are not like that. They’re more like MS Word. Slowness is evenly distributed through the code. There is no hotspot to remove.

As an example of this, look at Nicholas Nethercote’s excellent series of blogs on making the Rust compiler faster: https://nnethercote.github.io/

The “bottlenecks” they find result in 1% speedups.

Counterpoint, I wrote a Python program that reads a load of JSON and runs regex searches over it. It was quite slow. Rewrote it in Rust as a straight 1:1 port, no algorithmic changes. 50x speedup.

I think you must have either done something very wrong or your Python program didn’t really do anything other than call Python built-ins that are actually written in C.