[mindwok]

Yep, and Rust famously goes beyond this by modelling memory ownership at compile time.

In fact, the more behaviour we can model at compile time the better when it comes to LLMs - there's some cool ideas here like transpiling Rust into languages for formal verification. See https://github.com/formal-land/coq-of-rust as an example.

Formal verification was one of those things that was previously so annoying to do that it rarely made it past academic use cases or extremely important libraries, but I think LLMs take the tedium out of it. Perhaps formal verification will have a "test driven development" type of moment in the sun thanks to this.

[koakuma-chan]

Can LLMs properly code in Rust yet? There is way more TypeScript code out there compared to Rust, and I doubt structured output can alleviate this.

[vessenes]

my experience - yes! but. It's more of an edit - compile - fix loop than a write (seemingly) correct code on the first try. This might be a feature.

There is a little occasional difficulty on syntax with rust, but there are often the same sort of logic errors / getting lost an llm would have on another codebase -- the compiler helps catch many of these.

[NitpickLawyer]

> This might be a feature.

I think so as well. The rust errors are some of the most "helpful" and easy to understand (once you grok the core concepts around rust) and it seems that the loop of - generate (maybe constrained) - check - fix benefits from this. In my testing it is better than python (long ass traces that you have to manually trim for the LLM).

[OutOfHere]

Are you saying that the non-looping generators are grossly insufficient for Rust? This matters because the non-looping generators have a fixed monthly subscription cost, whereas the looping ones could cost per call.

[vessenes]

I’m not sure what you mean here. All of my coding is done in a loop; something writes, something compiles, something fixes, once compiling, something tests and writes more, repeat until you need bed.

If you mean “can GitHub copilot author long syntactically, type, and memory-safe- correct rust code in one shot?” Then the answer is “not right now”

[steveklabnik]

They can, yes.