Re:Show HN: I rewrote my Mac Electron app in Rust
by atoav on Thursday May 29, 2025 @06:12AM
(#44124571)
Yes and no, Rust is suitable to solve a certain set of problems in a certain way. Or you could say: Rust brings certain qualities to the table that may or may not suit your project.
A hacker blog I read regularly made a challenge about the fastest tokenizer in any language. I just had learned basic Rust and decided why the heck not. I spent 15 minutes with a naive/lazy approach and entered the result. It won second place, where the third place was a C implementation and the first place was highly optimized assembler.
This is not nothing and if I had written this in my main language (python) I wouldn't even have made the top 10.
So if you want a language where the result is comparably performant while giving you some confidence in how it is not behaving, Rust is a good choice. But that isn't the only metric. People understanding the language is also important and there other languages shine. Everything is about trade offs.
A hacker blog I read regularly made a challenge about the fastest tokenizer in any language. I just had learned basic Rust and decided why the heck not. I spent 15 minutes with a naive/lazy approach and entered the result. It won second place, where the third place was a C implementation and the first place was highly optimized assembler.
This is not nothing and if I had written this in my main language (python) I wouldn't even have made the top 10.
So if you want a language where the result is comparably performant while giving you some confidence in how it is not behaving, Rust is a good choice. But that isn't the only metric. People understanding the language is also important and there other languages shine. Everything is about trade offs.