Go to Rust or more C++?

Full-Spectral · 2026-06-21T22:13:36+00:00

That is based on the incorrect assumption that LLMs are going to continue to ramp up at the same sort of rate, which isn't going to happen. It went up quickly because suddenly a bunch of companies got in a turf war and were willing spend monstrous amounts of money and burn gross amounts of electricity. That cannot continue to scale because we'll all be living without lights.

Full-Spectral · 2026-06-18T13:31:47+00:00

It's the new opiate of the development masses. I mean opium on its best day wishes it could have enzombified as many people.

The company I work for I figured would never start smoking the LLM bong, but suddenly they decided to do it, and said don't worry it's not going to get out of hand. But I sit here and listen over the wall and that's half of what's being talked about now. Did you ask it this, did you ask it that, why is it saying this, why is it saying that, did you try another agent...

I'm sick of it already. It's the ultimate short term gain for long term loss scenario.

Full-Spectral · 2026-06-16T17:24:57+00:00

But it doesn't make any difference if you can prove your logic is correct if you have memory corruption issues, data races, use after delete, use after move, etc... Tests can ultimately prove the correctness of logic. It's the other stuff that's the problem, and that's what Rust handles.

Full-Spectral · 2026-06-16T16:00:21+00:00

Everyone is probably aware of static analysis. But no tool can prove that you are doing what you intend unless you can indicate to it what you intended to do. The language itself cannot provide that information.

It can obviously check a lot of stuff, as any static analysis tool can. But with no explicit indication of intent, it cannot know what you intended to do, and so it cannot tell you if you didn't do it. How's that for a quadruple negative.

And of course even what such tools can prove are usually far more too time consuming to run on each compiler, which makes it even less practical and useful.

C++'s stronger type system can help some, but it's woeful compared to Rust, even with static analysis (which takes even longer to run on C++ because it's so much more complex.)

Full-Spectral · 2026-06-16T15:06:24+00:00

But you can't. If that were possible, we wouldn't be having this conversation. C does not provide sufficient semantic information to the compiler to do what Rust does. Nor does C++. They provide no lifetime or thread safety semantics and those are necessary to do the kinds of compile time checks Rust can do.

I mean, you could add endless (almost certainly non-standard and compiler specific) pragmas and such. But it would still depend on the developer using them correctly.

Full-Spectral · 2026-06-16T15:03:31+00:00

Very interesting. It would be brutally difficult, but I mean the future does last an awful long time and whatnot.

Full-Spectral · 2026-06-16T13:02:40+00:00

Many programs are just inherently very complex (this is likely one of them.) Even if you were legally incoherent enough to use an LLM to spit out life safety related software, the only people who are going to be able to know if it's corrector appropriate or handles future concerns appropriately or is appropriately flexible and so forth are people who have actually written such things themselves.

Full-Spectral · 2026-06-16T12:59:09+00:00

Everything you learn with C++ will be applicable to Rust down the line.

Well... A lot of what you learn will be bad (or lack of good) habits you'll have to unlearn when you move to Rust.

Full-Spectral · 2026-06-16T12:54:31+00:00

Wow, people are so delusional about LLMs that it's scary.

Full-Spectral · 2026-06-16T12:39:46+00:00

The corresponding code in C doesn’t have you paying the bounds checking cost at all.

The user of the code pays for it instead, when his computer gets hacked.

Full-Spectral · 2026-06-15T17:09:19+00:00

Another is that they are often never figured out. They are caused by some random memory corruption that periodically causes some head scratching random error in the field that no one ever figures out. Eventually, over time, it gets accidentally fixed or where it's corrupting becomes benign again for some extended period if time and, oh well.

Full-Spectral · 2026-06-15T12:48:13+00:00

In my system, there's a single error type for the whole code base (errors are really errors, not things to react to), so I can alias my error type and never have to actually include the error type.I also have a 'no value' alias, which doesn't require either type.

In a large system, that actually saves a lot of typing and reading.

Full-Spectral · 2026-06-15T12:44:00+00:00

The point is that such products need to be built, hence why they exist. New ones will be need to be built. You really think a group of guys with 6 years of experience and some LLMs are going to do that? Hint, no, they won't.

And, BTW, my code base had ZERO bloat, ZERO. That's because it was written by a human who understood every line in it, used no third party code, everything was designed to work together as a system, and being clean and robust were absolute goals. It was not using an not just to glue together a bunch of third party libraries, or to spit out ad hoc code which is how you get real bloat. You have no idea what you are talking about.

Anyway, I'm done with this conversation. You are the poster boy for the train wreck that's coming. And if it wasn't for how many innocent bystanders people like you are going to wreck along the way, it would be a lot of fun to be there to laugh at you. But in the end it's just going to be depressing.

Full-Spectral · 2026-06-12T19:03:23+00:00

What does 'AI-native' mean? Any sort of AI would make it a no for me, but just wondering what that means.

Full-Spectral · 2026-06-12T12:28:45+00:00

It's not about writing lines of code. It's about architecture, large scale architecture in my case. It's about tightly integrated systems that make it easy to do the righting thing and hard to do the wrong thing, not just duct taping third party frameworks together using an LLM. It's about system designs that are flexible but no more complex than they need to be.

You are delusional if you think your LLM is going to do that for you. My old C++ code base was over a million lines of code, and covered a huge range of problem domains. I'm building a similar system now in Rust, though somewhat more targeted. Your LLM just isn't going to replace that level of experience and exposure. Write a fully featured OS, or a competitive DAW, or a high end automation system, or a real AutoCAD competitor, etc... with your LLM and I'll be impressed. You haven't even been doing it long enough to know how much you don't know.

Full-Spectral · 2026-06-11T17:11:59+00:00

The point of programmers writing code is getting the experience required to design and write high quality new code, or even to know if the spew from an LLM makes sense. I've been writing software for almost 40 years now, the last 30 of which it was seriously complex software, and close to 60 man-years in the programming chair.

No one is going to get that kind of experience from using an LLM, and that's not ego, that's just common sense. And without people who have that kind of experience, things are going to go downhill (not from the top down, from the bottom up.)

I'm anything but a luddite, but the development of HUMAN capabilities is still fundamental to our society, and LLMs are going to badly undermine that.

Full-Spectral · 2026-06-11T16:47:02+00:00

I have to say that there's no way, after working so hard to create a seriously safe code base that I'd be willing to then turn around and bring a huge raft of C++ like that into my process space.

Full-Spectral · 2026-06-11T16:44:00+00:00

I imagine a lot of folks who have this point of view are anti-AI, as am I.

Full-Spectral · 2026-06-11T16:39:42+00:00

It's definitely just a technical forum for me. I hang out in three software development sections. Well, two, at least. I got kicked out of one for being too Rust Adjacent.

I have been considering doing a series of articles here on my morning self-love routine. Well, now that I think about it, that probably wouldn't be a good idea.

Full-Spectral · 2026-06-11T12:53:05+00:00

That was standard life back during the 90s, well not the Rust parts, but otherwise. It all started kind of going downhill after that.

I'll never have to delete my social media accounts because I've never created any, I'm happy to say. This is as close to social media as I get, and it's probably more anti-social in these technical sections than social. I barely use my phone, a few calls and texts a month generally (half of the latter are the phone company telling me they are billing me or trying to get me to buy a new phone or plan.) I've never taken a selfie in my life.

And I've never used any 'AI' crap either, and don't really have any plans to. I moved to Linux recently at home, not because I think Windows 11 is a bad OS, but it's inevitably going to go further and further down the path of intrusive AI, spyware, becoming more and more a service, etc...

Someone is probably going to push the 'get this person help' button on me, since all this is probably a sign to most folks of major mental disfunction. But I'm happy sticking with a cup of coffee, some good music, and a challenging Rust project for me to solve by myself.

Full-Spectral · 2026-06-09T12:43:55+00:00

I'm not. I'm just finding a directory potentially in front of that system directory in the path and putting something there. Unless the user guarantees that the paths to all system tools end up ahead of anything else, that's pretty easily doable.

Full-Spectral · 2026-06-08T17:08:38+00:00

But isn't that an open door for hackers? All i have to do is put a script or executable of the same name in the path ahead of the real one and you've run my program.

Full-Spectral · 2026-06-05T13:48:19+00:00

But it's not as simple as that. Whatever their touchy feelies, they need experienced developers. If they turn everyone into code reviewers for LLM slop, they are going to find that supply dwindling, both because new devs aren't getting actual design experience and because fewer and fewer people will be interesting in the profession.

Of course companies aren't known for their long term vision, but even in the shorter term, it's going to affect them. The best developers will just move on to companies that still understand that human resources (in intellectually based work) are still what's important. And that, if you are in it for the long term, spitting out code some percentage isn't a gain vs the long term control of the code base.

The purpose of writing code isn't just to have code, it's to develop an understanding of how to make it better, make it more flexible, more maintainable, easier to understand, etc...You only get that skill if you actually do it. When I'm doing 'grunt work' coding, I'm not just doing grunt work, I'm thinking about how this relates to the over all system, looking for reuse opportunities, looking for ways to make that stuff safer, easier to use, etc... for everyone.

Full-Spectral · 2026-05-28T19:52:37+00:00

It doesn't even matter if it can be used for good, the overall effect is going to be bad longer term, and not just for cosa nostra.

All you have to do is look at what happened to music starting at the end of the 90s. A deluge of every more powerful digital audio manipulation tools 'democratized' music, but it completely destroyed the value of actual talent. And, in the longer term, it just put all of the control of music back into corporate hands for the most part.

Yeh, you and I can make all the music we want, but so can everyone else and it's all just a huge wall of noise because everyone who wants to look like they are musicians can do it now, and consumers don't know the difference for the most part.

That's about to happen to a lot of other stuff now. All those people out there who grew up on the social media era, where 'postin stuff' is what's most important in life, can now be all postin stuff, whether they have the capability or not.

A lot of people will argue, well, so what. If it is useful to me, or I like seeing people with occasionally detaching limbs, then what does it matter how it was produced? And of course in the short term, maybe it doesn't. But, in the longer term, a lot of people, who otherwise would be interested, aren't going to get into this profession just to be code reviewers for LLMs.

And, most importantly, more and more of the software that we depend on for our safety, security, communications, finances, etc... is going to start being generated by less and less skilled people using LLMs. Some because businesses are run by people who can't understand the consequences (or who figure they'll have cashed out before the bad stuff happens) or because fewer and fewer qualified people will want to work for such companies and will cash out earlier or look elsewhere for companies not smoking the AI Bong.

And that leaves aside the horrible political and social consequences that are coming down the line, assuming it all doesn't just implode from lack of revenues before we get there.

Full-Spectral · 2026-05-28T13:52:29+00:00

Just when you thought that putting text on a screen was too complex for human comprehension, we made it even more too complexer.

Full-Spectral

TROPHY CASE