FRANCESCO GADALETA
COULD RUST
BE THE FUTURE OF AI?
I
n a recent tweet, Elon Musk claimed that Rust is going to be the language of artificial general intelligence. Some people might think this claim is an exaggeration (to be taken with a pinch of salt, like many of his tweets), but in my opinion, Musk’s tweet confirms the speculation surrounding this amazing language. It’s no longer a secret that Rust is a language of the future. My company, for example, has migrated most of the commercial projects from the usual Python stack (Python C, C++ stack) to Rust, solving many issues of code safety and efficiency. And that’s exactly the point of Elon’s tweet: Rust has many advantages over Python. In this article, I’ll evaluate the various uses of Rust and the ways it has the potential to overtake standard programming language.
THE LIMITATIONS OF PYTHON TODAY When it comes to artificial intelligence and machine learning, Python has been the standard for about 20 years. In the fields of data science and machine learning, for example, many Python frameworks are available for data transformations and data manipulation pipelines, as well as for more sophisticated things like deep learning frameworks, computer vision and more recently large language models (LLMs). But this is about to change. The latest big trend of large language models is to impose some form of
optimisation when it comes to memory storage and compute, for example. And because Python isn’t the best language for efficiency and optimisation, developers have been working on alternatives.
MOJO AND RUST: NEW LANGUAGES TO HANDLE OPTIMISATION A language called Mojo has recently been designed by Chris Lattner, one of the field’s most talented developers; Lattner is the inventor of Clang and Swift, and also the LLVM suite of tools for compiling from a high-level language to an intermediate representation (many of the low-level architectures that we are used to dealing with today). Lattner demonstrated that Python could be up to 35,000 times slower than compiled languages, and he created Mojo to rectify this. Mojo hasn’t been released yet, so it’s not fully accessible to all. However, it’s already proving to be one of the best combinations between Python (or interpreted languages in general) and compiled languages. Mojo’s been designed specifically for AI tasks and AI workflows, and it features many capabilities that traditional computer programming languages don’t have. Rust is another new language on the scene; having been the underdog for a while, Rust has recently become wildly popular, and I believe - as perhaps Elon does that Rust is set to be the best replacement for Python and Python workflows. Why? For one, Rust has key
40 | THE DATA SCIENTIST
