It's nearly impossible to have an idea that is truly novel and has no prior art. Even if it isn't the exact same thing, you can see the ideas that inspired this one. All of us are standing on the shoulders of giants all the time.
But you've missed a couple of reasons why Rust rewrites are popular. Rewriting in Rust is proven path to better performance (Python codebases pandas -> polars, black -> ruff) or better security. C/C++ codebases like FreeType being rewritten in Rust for security (https://developer.chrome.com/blog/memory-safety-fonts). What should people looking for performance or security do to mollify you?
You are asking why aren't completely new ideas being implemented in Rust? They are. Check out https://rerun.io. I could be mistaken, but I haven't seen anything similar to rerun. And that was implemented in Rust. Maybe these aren't visible because there genuinely are so few things that are completely novel.
> Sure, there’s a lot of crap. But you don’t have to watch that.
The way people complain, I genuinely think they don't know about this option.
For example, Mr. Beast content isn't for me. But I was also living blissfully under a rock for years without knowing who the heck he was. Now that I know about him I simply don't click on his content and therefore never see it in my feed.
"But what if I click by accident?" - glad you asked. Simply delete it from your watch history and see your recommendations improve.
Why can’t something be faster than C? If a language is able to convey more information to a backend like LLVM, the backend could use that to produce more optimised code than what it could do for C.
For example, if the language is able to say, for any two pointers, the two pointers will not overlap - that would enable the backend to optimise further. In C this requires an explicit restrict keyword. In Rust, it’s the default.
grep (C) is about 5-10x slower than ripgrep (Rust). That’s why ripgrep is used to execute all searches in VS Code and not grep.
Or a different tack. If you wrote a program that needed to sort data, the Rust version would probably be faster thanks to the standard library sort being the fastest, across languages (https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/124032). Again, faster than C.
Happy to give more examples if you’re interested.
There’s nothing special about C that entitles it to the crown of “nothing faster”. This would have made sense in 2005, not 2025.
First, I would say that "ripgrep is generally faster than GNU grep" is a true statement. But sometimes GNU grep is faster than ripgrep and in many cases, performance is comparable or only a "little" slower than ripgrep.
Secondly, VS Code using ripgrep because of its speed is only one piece of the picture. Licensing was also a major consideration. There is an issue about this where they originally considered ripgrep (and ag if I recall correctly), but I'm on mobile so I don't have the link handy.
The number of tools matters less than the quality of the tools. Rust’s inherent guarantees + miri + software verification tools mean that in practice Rust code, even with unsafe, ends up being higher quality.
I'm glad they wrote several more comments. The first comment was intriguing, but the more the wrote the more wild it got. Especially the part about being connected to life like a person in a fall airplane.
I think they've mixed up Stoicism with some other philosophy entirely. They think Stoicism means feeling nothing, doing nothing. Almost like the Hindu concept of sanyasi.
True, the other Good Emperors - Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius didn't set up their children as their successors. They each adopted someone who would be good at the job. But there was one difference between them and Marcus Aurelius - none of them had biological sons. Their adopted son would be their only heir.
Marcus Aurelius' decision can be criticised in hindsight because Commodus was terrible at his job. But I'm not sure I could have done differently in Marcus' shoes. Parents find it difficult to view their children objectively and feel the need to protect them. Even if he was aware of Commodus' faults he also knew this - if he adopted someone else and crowned him Emperor, then it would have led to civil war after his own death. Either Commodus and his other sons would kill the adopted son or vice versa. Having all of them alive and at large would be an unstable equilibrium that could only be solved with war.
Come on man, this guy ran an Empire pretty well for a couple of decades despite challenges like war and plague. Maybe he knew what he was doing. Give him the benefit of the doubt.
- The Rust implementation of GNU Coreutils compares favourably in performance. For example, uutils/sort outperforms coreutils/sort by 6x while working on every mainstream OS - Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Illumos, Redox, Android, macOS, and Windows.(https://lwn.net/Articles/1007907/)
So yes, I'm surprised by your claim of C programs "often" outperforming comparable Rust programs, but I'd be interested to know if even the "sometimes" is true. Please share if you've found any.
The other claims are questionable as well, but this one was the most easily disproven.
It is possible to write idiomatic Rust and C. It is possible to write assembly in the form of Rust and C. In both cases, they're comparable in performance.
But leaving toy programs like Benchmarks Game and AoC aside, I gave 6 examples of Rust outperforming C. Do you have any examples of C outperforming Rust?
> Do you have any examples of C outperforming Rust?
I don't have a pony in that race.
> uutils/sort outperforms coreutils/sort by 6x
"He used the hyperfine command-line benchmarking tool to run a test ten times; sorting a text file containing all of Shakespeare's works to see which implementation was faster. The first time he performed the test, he used a debug build of the Rust version of sort. In that demo, Rust's version was 1.45x faster than the GNU version. Then he ran the test again using a non-debug version, which showed the Rust version performing the test six times faster than GNU's implementation."
Might it be that a new implementation in C would also have been faster?
And sure, it’s possible that someone could write a C program that compares in speed to all the Rust programs I’ve mentioned. C is a Turing complete language after all. I’m only pointing out that it hasn’t happened in practice.
I don’t think anyone could have said something more rude or ignorant if they tried.
> designed as an experiment
Ha. As if you could design such an experiment. What, you’ll place two rats at a keyboard and ask them to implement grep? Bffr.
I’m pointing out the obvious - no one has actually written these mythical C programs that outperform Rust, to say nothing about security and reliability. You’ve deluded yourself into thinking that all it needs is “an experiment”. lol.
But you've missed a couple of reasons why Rust rewrites are popular. Rewriting in Rust is proven path to better performance (Python codebases pandas -> polars, black -> ruff) or better security. C/C++ codebases like FreeType being rewritten in Rust for security (https://developer.chrome.com/blog/memory-safety-fonts). What should people looking for performance or security do to mollify you?
You are asking why aren't completely new ideas being implemented in Rust? They are. Check out https://rerun.io. I could be mistaken, but I haven't seen anything similar to rerun. And that was implemented in Rust. Maybe these aren't visible because there genuinely are so few things that are completely novel.
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