Because the agentic world involves the generation of so much code that gets harder to review, I would think the compile-time guarantees of Rust would make it a better option.
This is true if the token budget and time are not taken into account. In practice though, waiting minutes instead of seconds per build multiplied by prompt and again by change adds up very fast.
Incremental Rust builds are almost never minutes (on recentish hardware)
A quick measurement on my web browser project with almost 600 dependencies:
- A clean "cargo check" was 31s
- An incremental "cargo check" with a meaningful change was 1.5s
Building is a little slower:
- A clean "cargo build" was 56.01s
- An incremental "cargo build" was 4s
But I find that LLMs are mostly calling "check" on Rust code.
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That's on an Apple M1 Pro. The latest M4/M5 machines as ~twice as fast.
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