Are you "building a boat out of paperclips" if you don't start coding in Rust?

Rust, a language on the fringe of industries like Big Tech and finance, has a cult following for its ability to combine performance and safety. Fans have called for Rust to replace the likes of C and C++ for years. When it comes to the former, veteran language designer Simon Peyton Jones agrees; he recently said "things would be way better" if we "rewrote all of our software infrastructure in Rust."

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Jones, co-creator of functional language Haskell, recently spoke to ex-Meta engineer Ryan Peterman on a podcast. He said that Haskell and C are polar opposites. C has a lot of memory safety issues, but it's very useful, while Haskell was extremely safe but had very few use cases. Rust, however, keeps Haskell's safety while also maintaining C's performance. It'd be a gargantuan task to convert all the world's C into Rust, but Jones said "it's tragic how much effort and ingenuity and money  has been lost" by writing computational infrastructure "in an insecure language." He said that continuing to develop C infrastructure is like "build[ing] a boat out of paperclips and [being] surprised that it's leaky."

C++ has a similar reputation for being unsafe, but it's a very different language at heart. It's difficult to use, and involves a lot debugging, but in return you get supposedly unparalleled speed. For some of the most lucrative engineering roles, such as those in low-latency trading teams at hedge funds and prop firms, the safety of Rust is somewhat irrelevant. Engineers are paid upwards of $500k to make their code extremely fast but also extremely reliable. Engineers that have tried to port their C++ systems into Rust have previously complained that the language is "a nightmare to implement" for the most latency sensitive aspects. This doesn't mean hedge funds don't appreciate Rust. We noted last year that hedge funds like Capula and Millennium are replacing their old C infrastructure with Rust. It won't be replacing C++ at these firms any time soon.

There are other options; Jones said that OCaml is "an absolute hotbed of innovation." It's another functional language, but it's more "strict" than Haskell. Jones said that, similarly to C++ it doesn't get in your way when writing code, and that "good OCaml programmers won't [create] many side effects." It's the language of choice at Jane Street, the electronic trading firm which generated $39.6bn in revenue last year, so its presumably at least competitive with C++ when it comes to latency.

Functional languages like OCaml and Rust may become more influential in the age of AI. Jones said that, due to their stricter focus on safety, they're less likely to accept unforeseen bugs written by AI which "dramatically tightens" the code editing process. C++ creator Bjarne Soustrup said last month that the process of editing out AI-written bugs is causing top C++ engineers to retire; perhaps they'll come back if they're offered a Rust job instead. 

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