What exactly makes Carbon absurd?

boshalfoshal 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There is 0 practicality in inventing an entirely new coding language that only one company uses, and you have to teach it to thousands of new engineers. Rust exists and fits the job totally fine and is used in more places and has actual support outside of a single entity (i.e you can actually hire people that feasibly know the language).

It was clearly done because some PL guys at google really wanted to make a new cool language and Google was the perfect place to incubate it without it getting axed. Probably got a couple of promos out of it too. This is clearly not the best use of time or money, but I guess if you're google you have so much of both it probably doesn't really make a dent, and you can keep a few very smart people happy with shiny new projects.

Also, LLMs being used for a large portion of coding nowadays sort of remove the need for these types of languages, IMO. They make less "silly" bugs (both logical and structural) that languages like this are meant to catch, and they are much better at languages that are better represented in the training corpus. This somewhat obviates the need for very niche "type/dummy-safe" languages like carbon (and even rust/zig, imo). So even if you did want to use Carbon, you'd likely have to bootstrap a decent amount of your own "good" carbon code to post train an LLM, and even then, it likely won't have that big of a gain vs just having an LLM write C++ or even Rust. If you are a company that still reviews code, you should just have an LLM code in a language most people can understand anyway to make verifiability tractable.

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torginus 35 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Rust is not the end of history. One of the difficulties with the language lies exactly with porting existing code written in an OOP style to idiomatic Rust, as those codebases weren't written with ownership in mind.

Such rewrites will contain judicious uses of Cell, RefCell, unwrap() etc. which make for ugly code that's not exactly simple to understand and might even have some landmines (crashes).

Getting rid of these requires a subtantial amount of engineering effort, which I'm not sure how well these LLM manage.

Given the nigh-universal experience of LLMs producing an ungodly mess when left to their own devices, I have my concerns.

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computerdork 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Hmm, I don't disagree with you that LLM's remove the need for type-safe languages, but as the blog mentioned, Google is porting their C++/C code to rust. Does this mean the port is waste of time and that they should just rely on the LLM's to catch memory errors?

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boshalfoshal 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I mean Rust definitely has a better tradeoff than Carbon in this case, re readability/verifiability by a person (and sufficiently good internet training data).

I personally think that you _could_ use an LLM to catch these types of boundary case errors without having to port the _entire_ C++ codebase to Rust, but maybe pre-emptively porting to Rust now can catch some of these cases for cheaper than doing a full LLM sweep. Also more cynically, its a good benchmark lol.

I guess if you really believe in curve of LLM capabilities you should just use a language that has the best performance, safety, flexibility, and extensibility, since in the limit few/no people will actually read the code anyway. I think this ends up being Rust.

	▲	chis 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I'm not an expert on this. But isn't it the case that C++ code could have errors that span the entire codebase, like a setup in file A triggered by a bug in file B which is immensely far away on the import graph? A classic would be a use-after-free. To me that's the thing that Rust can help with, even if silly bugs aren't being written by AI. The other thing is just that rewriting some old human-written codebase in Rust probably immediately catches many bugs. It would be hard to prompt the AI to properly scan for such bugs itself, they're lazy when working in that modality.

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mike_hearn 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> There is 0 practicality in inventing an entirely new coding language that only one company uses, and you have to teach it to thousands of new engineers

They did that for Go and it seems to have worked out for them though.

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lesuorac 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Didn’t FaceBook fork php into another language?

I’m not entirely sure Google should have both Go and Carbon but when you have billions in server costs it makes sense to do extreme stuff for even basis points of performance. I’m still surprised at how much java there is.

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2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[deleted]

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bvinc 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I’m not op. But I think it’s not Carbon itself that is absurd.

It’s absurd to think that Carbon is the solution to memory safety when rust exists and Carbon’s memory safety story is basically “TBD”.

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fg137 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I wouldn't call it absurd, but very questionable at least. Most companies are not going to even consider throwing money at this adventure.

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Maxatar 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The fact that it will never exist.

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gorbot 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

rust's existence?