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by mtsr 953 days ago
Some dev workflow tools really benefit from being very fast. And parsing and ast building and the like are actually things that rust is quite good for.

That doesn’t mean it couldn’t be done in other languages, but it’s a weighing of trade-offs. And of course, groups of people, such as developers on socials, are quite sensitive to popularity.

2 comments

> And parsing and ast building and the like are actually things that rust is quite good for.

Having built a compiler and typechecker in Rust, I don't know if I'd say that it was "quite good" for it. Going back, I'd still do it again, but it wasn't exactly a cakewalk. Rust's lifetime rules and visceral hatred of referential structs did not make my life easy at all. I definitely took the easy way out with a lot of string copies too.

Just as an example: Our eslint checks take 2 minutes to complete. Improving this would considerably improve developer productivity.