Ha yes I always thought this is how assembly should look. Although why not go further - instead of move a, b which is ambiguous about the move direction, why not just copy 99% of other programming languages: b = a.

Also it's a real disappointment that even new ISAs like RISC-V have the same "assembly must be unreadable" brain disease. auipc? Come on. You can't even claim that they want a strict 1:1 assembly:instruction language because they added a ton of pseudoinstructions. Even add can turn into add or addi.

Anyway although AI means you can easily make a tool like this, I think it also means there is not really any point to it anymore. Oh well.

Good work! Has anyone tried throwing AI at the problem? This is the sort of thing that it's really good at... Although I guess normally that's because there's a lot of medium hanging fruit that people haven't had time to look at, whereas the Rust compiler is very mature. Still, definitely worth a try. Anyone from Anthropic or OpenAI here? I have unlimited tokens at work but unfortunately I don't use Rust.

There's so much slop I could tell this was AI just from the title.

Repeat after me: I will not use AI for prose.

This is pretty much the "I fancy her but I don't want to reveal it unless it's reciprocal" problem right?

Impossible because anyone can just lie. Say they fancy everyone, see who they match with and then say "haha joke!".

Also £5 says your application is dating/sex/kinks lol

LLMs love advertising / speechwriting techniques. Wikipedia has a good list here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing

If you use AI regularly these things are very very obvious.

Yeah maybe, but usually if I'm using Make it's because my use case is "I want users to be able to build stuff without having to install any more build tools". The curse of network effects. That's the only reason I'd ever use Bash too. Otherwise I'd switch to Nushell in a second.

Can that scale down to individual .cpp files though? My understanding was that it works more at the package level.

I don't think that's unique to LLMs though. Traditional learning material is very often like that too, and I actually find it worse because you can't ask it questions.

You need a project that you want to achieve. Maybe automating something, or some kind of Arduino thing? The latter might be especially good for learning because you can't trivially delegate it to AI, but you can still ask AI for help.

How much are they offering? 😄

The latest models are capable of non-slop code and tolerable prose (OpenAI is much better than Anthropic on the prose but I think Anthropic has a slight edge on code quality). It's really just pre-Astra models that are super sloppy. Annoyingly you get what you pay for.

Also the benchmarks don't really seem to capture this at all. I guess it is difficult to have a benchmark for code quality or writing style.

Ooo interesting, I didn't know that!

Ugh I really wish they'd support something less awful than GNU linker scripts. You should be able to write linker scripts in Starlark or something.

Might have helped the introduction if you said what you are talking about...

Here are the top 5

The top 5 what?

Looks like it should just work, right? On stable it doesn't, and it trips twice.

"Trips" does it Claude? 🤨

Rust is pretty great in almost all domains. The only ones where I think Python is a sensible choice are research, where a REPL is really useful (think Jupyter).

There are plenty of things that are "scripting", i.e. ad-hoc admin of other projects that aren't actually Python projects, where you want to share code between multiple scripts.

Rust has scripting support. It's nightly only but that's not actually a big deal since running nightly is trivial.

It has some limitations currently, but... so does Python.

Pairwise ranking is definitely better than stars, but nobody wants to read your slop, sorry.

Google shows there are lots of these already: Flickchart, Canonova (slop), moup.app (also slop), popcornlist (possibly slop but they at least wrote their own prose so they get a pass, though it is an iPhone app only), pairckle (generic pairwise ranking, not slop!)

Also it doesn't sound like you have figured out how to actually do the ranking yet. Look up Bradley-Terry or TrueSkill.

As usually, the difficult bit is getting users.

Just because import works different in the language than the ones you like, does not mean the language is crap.

No, it means it's unsuitable for scripting, if you need anything more than a single file. Better than Bash of course (not hard).

Why bother with the significant pain of FFI when you can just write the whole thing in Rust?

Also "the critical parts" is mostly a myth. After a small amount of optimisation, the vast majority of programs do not have nice isolated hotspots.