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  • The topic of rewrites in Rust is a difficult one.

    Mostly the reasons are not of technical, but of political nature. I mean no one likes to be told that their language is "not good enough". Or "not safe enough". It is our instinct to defend what we love and have put so much time and effort into. But reality is, that Rust really helps eliminate whole classes of errors, that can happen even to the most experienced C or C++ devs.

    Accepting that things will and should be rewritten in Rust - until an even better language comes along - is necessary. That does not mean that Rust needs to replace all code on earth. For sure there are many cases where it should not. But in the times of Fable and GPT 5.6, it becomes even more important to reduce any attack surface as much as possible.

  • Its kinda hard to understand the point somebody's making, when its articulated/made up by AI. Slop.
  • Similar experience to applications written with Claude slop.
  • I've seen someone rewrite a wireguard proxy in rust for performance without realizing that it's just a daemon that interacts with the kernel to setup routing... But hey, at least the key generation is faster!
  • 1. Hop around a few rust communities and fill yourself up with full love of rust and hatred against c/c++.

    2. Ignore any technical tradeoffs and considerations but solely lean on your guts and hypes on the Internet.

    3. Ask Claude to rewrite the entire codebase to rust. Boom! Now you’re allowed to show off yourself on LinkedIn and HW as a super great rust engineer.

  • Remembering times when JetBrains was about carefully crafted Java intellisense. And I don't think demand for such tools is gone.
  • With the advent of A.I. these rewrites should be Full, but the generated code should only be used as a starting point. The code should be refactored so the engineers can take responsibility for maintaining and updating it.

    But I'm afraid managers will force engineers to put the generated code straight into production unaltered so they can claim their million dollar bonuses. And when things go South they'll call on those same engineers to fix things yesterday.

  • I rewrote my Haskell project in Rust.

    memory usage dropped to half, execution speed is now 2x. Cross deployment is easy from silicon man to x64.

    There are many low level optimizations available which i can exploit, compile is super fast for my project so development experience is better.

    LOC dropped to half of the original.

    Rust made life so much easier :)

  • Step 1. Start with a library that is a fat wrapper around a massive C++ library that does all the hard work

    Step 2. Rewrite only the wrapper using already written tests.

    Step 3. Get internet points because an LLM Rewrote it in Rust!

  • To be fair, big refactors like this need to be done gradually. This is obviously the first step.

    Next step can be to port it using e.g. tractor tooling and have a bunch of unsafe calls you need to implement. It's a really fun puzzle. The goal is to have no more cpp dependency

  • For Qt apps written in C++ I don't see how that could work yet.
  • Qt Rust interop crate. Idem wxWidgets.
  • You don't. This days run your C/C++ code through AI and fix the issues it found. That gives you more in shorter time.
  • > Disclaimer: This article was created with the assistance of AI and reviewed by the JetBrains RustRover team

    Honestly there should be a filter for these types of articles. I’m not going to bother reading something another person did not even bother writing.

    by ale
  • "AI-assisted" != "AI-written". People who have AI write their articles entirely surely don't mention it at all.