I'm curious about motivation - bounds checks for corrupted inputs seems like it would be one, but it also seems that fixing corrupted input handling in a C/C++ code base would not be too hard, and probably less of an effort? So why did you choose the rewrite?
And second, did you use any AI tools for the rewrite?
My very naive understanding is that a part of what makes mold fast is concurrency, which I'd expect to be a lot more error-prone in C/C++. Not having to worry about data races might give more confidence with trying out more complex techniques for how to split up work in a way that ends up making things faster
> fixing corrupted input handling in a C/C++ code base would not be too hard
The best programmers on the planet have tried and failed with this task for 50 years now, so I don't think this is true.
The main disadvantage of Rust right now is not supporting some more obscure platforms, but because mold wouldn't support them anyway I don't see that as a problem.
> The main disadvantage of Rust right now is not supporting some more obscure platforms
Last time I checked, I got impressed by the wide platform support, once you go down the tier list (https://doc.rust-lang.org/nightly/rustc/platform-support.htm...). What "obscure platform" specifically are you thinking about, that is currently missing from those lists?
I think the claim is that GCC supports a few obscure platforms that LLVM doesn't. Don't ask me which, that is just the claim that I heard multiple times. So it's not Rust that limits platforms, but LLVM. And they say the GCC backend efforts of Rust are meant to deal with that.
I suspect fearless concurrency is another motivating factor. Better perf can be achieved by squeezing more parallelism, but without borrow checking it's difficult to do fine-grained parallelism correctly.
What warrants an off the cuff comment like this?
I can take any piece of software and just say a vague statement like that. All of software... What does it even bring to the conversation? Just vague "they"s again we keep on propping up? Who is unethical? The mold team? The AI? The rust foundation? The ASCII character set? The cloud system it has been compiled on? Oh no obviously the backdoors in there?! Oh let us guess!!
Edit: this seems to have been cooking for a while when the first commit dropped: https://github.com/rui314/mold/commit/f41bfcd5c72ca30cce6498...
And second, did you use any AI tools for the rewrite?
The best programmers on the planet have tried and failed with this task for 50 years now, so I don't think this is true.
The main disadvantage of Rust right now is not supporting some more obscure platforms, but because mold wouldn't support them anyway I don't see that as a problem.
Last time I checked, I got impressed by the wide platform support, once you go down the tier list (https://doc.rust-lang.org/nightly/rustc/platform-support.htm...). What "obscure platform" specifically are you thinking about, that is currently missing from those lists?
IMO, given the recent commits: almost certainly.