logoalt Hacker News

kaysonyesterday at 7:42 PM3 repliesview on HN

When Microsoft rewrote it in go, there was a comment from one of the leads that they chose it over rust because of the similarity in paradigms (garbage collection, etc), and that using rust would've been more difficult, requiring a lot of "hoop jumping". Now that you've done it... Thoughts?


Replies

mohsen1yesterday at 7:46 PM

Yes indeed. More than 1 million lines of code (including tests) is jumping lots of hoops but with LLMs it's not as painful so you can just ask it to do the hard things.

Example of a Claude Code session after 2 hours of "Crunching" that came out without results https://github.com/mohsen1/tsz/pull/4868 (Edit I force pushed to PR to solve the problem, you can see the initial refuse message in the initial version of PR description)

Funny thing is, the last percent of the test have been so hard to work on that Opus 4.7 routinely bails and says "it's too involved or complicated" so I had to add prompts specifically asking it not to bail.

show 4 replies
adambrodyesterday at 8:10 PM

They mentioned that they wanted to port their compiler over to retain existing behavior (vs a re-write) and Rust has a hard time with their cyclic data structures.

calmooyesterday at 7:51 PM

Is GC useful for a static type checker? Or did they make a new runtime?

show 2 replies