Ask HN: Any objective research on which languages are best for AI agents?

I keep reading articles that suggest that Rust or Go or some other language is optimal for AI development because of feature X or lack of issue Y.

Has there been any actual head to head comparison of this using frontier models? Any benchmarks that purport to measure this?

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Leftium 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Theo video based on data from Tencent's Autocodebench: https://youtu.be/iV1EcfZSdCM

Conclusion: Elixir was the best (had the highest problem solve rate).

Reasons (Theo's interpretation):

- code collocation, where documentation is integrated directly within the source code

- design philosophy of a language (readability, clear idioms, and strict expectation management)

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Sources from video:

- https://github.com/Tencent-Hunyuan/AutoCodeBenchmark/tree/ma...

- https://martinalderson.com/posts/which-programming-languages...

- https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/19/nanolang/#atom-everyth...

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steveklabnik 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The frontier moves quickly enough that empiric testing is often out of date by the time that it’s published.

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mwigdahl 4 hours ago | parent [-]

For sure! It's possible there are relatively invariant properties that make one language or another "better" for LLM coding in general though (even if that's just the self-fulfilling prophecy of size of the training corpus).

	▲	steveklabnik 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I’m in agreement that I think that these exist, but I just haven’t seen anything that justifies this belief of mine yet. I have been looking, but it’s possible I just haven’t seen anything seen it. I’ve seen a lot of blog posts with fairly dubious claims here with relatively flimsy evidence. And I’ve seen a few papers trying to tackle the topic. But I think it’s a very open area of research currently.

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markus_zhang an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Which language is worst for AI? Just curious.

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andsoitis 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

DSLs work especially well with LLMs. DSLs focus on a narrow set of concepts in a single domain.