Don't forget his LLM based text compression software that won awards.

Guy is a genius. I hope he tries Rust someday

elevation 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Fabrice, if you're reading this, please consider replacing Rust instead with your own memory safe language.

The design intent of Rust is a powerful idea, and Rust is the best of its class, but the language itself is under-specified[1] which prevents basic, provably-correct optimizations[0]. At a technical level, Rust could be amended to address these problems, but at a social level, there are now too many people who can block the change, and there's a growing body of backwards compatibility to preserve. This leads reasonable people to give up on Rust and use something else[0], which compounds situations like [2] where projects that need it drop it because it's hard to find people to work on it.

Having written low-level high-performance programs, Fabrice Bellard has the experience to write a memory safe language that allows hardware control. And he has the faculties to assess design changes without tying them up in committee. I covet his attentions in this space.

[0]: https://databento.com/blog/why-we-didnt-rewrite-our-feed-han...

[1]: https://blog.polybdenum.com/2024/06/07/the-inconceivable-typ...

[2]: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/12/21/dropping-hyper/

	▲	Lerc 8 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I think of Rust might trigger a new generation of languages that are developed with the hindsight of rust. The principle of zero cost abstractions avoids a slow slide of compromising abstraction cost, but I think there could be small cost abstractions that would make for a more pragmatic language. Having Rust to point at to show what performance you could be achieving would aid in avoiding bloating abstractions.
	▲	userbinator an hour ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Bellard likely doesn't care one bit about memory safety or whatever other trendy things are popular these days.
	▲	saagarjha 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		> At a technical level, Rust could be amended to address these problems I don’t think it can, no.
	▲	imiric 8 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[dead]

▲

hsaliak 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

peak hacker news comment lol

	▲	vatsachak 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I've only been here for a month. I guess I'm learning well