Musk: I'm a Rust fan, but choose C for performance

As an "Internet celebrity" who is on the cusp of the storm almost all the time, Tesla CEO Elon Musk (Elon Musk) has been evaluated by the outside world as the Iron Man "dedicated to saving mankind from artificial intelligence". Recently, the big guy has caused heated discussions on social media due to a lot of "outrageous" remarks - under the topic of an AI company talking about programming "error messages", he replied "I am a Rust fan, but I will choose for performance. C".

On February 23, Greg Brockman, co-founder and chief technology officer of artificial intelligence company OpenAI, posted on social media: "One of the least-appreciated skills in programming is writing anti-frustrating error messages." One of the skills that is valued is writing friendly error messages.

He also listed at the back of the tweet that a good error message should have three main points:

(a) what the user did, the user's action history
(b) what acceptable inputs are
(c) how to fix the problem.

Musk first commented below this tweet that he agreed with Greg Brockman 100%, and then he also said "Compilers can be way better too. Not enough effort spent there." Compilers of programming languages can also do That's fine, it's just that the industry doesn't invest enough in compilers at the moment.

The reply also attracted a lot of netizens to come to the interactive thread. Some netizens mentioned Rust and said that Rust solved the problem of the compiler to a great extent.

To this, Musk replied: "I am also a fan of Rust, and I really appreciate the scalability of Rust. However, for maximum performance, the best solution is to use the C language with a custom compiler on specialized hardware."

"Using C with a custom compiler on specialized hardware," Musk said, is important for the car to infer the computer's max frame rate, while other scenarios mostly use C++ and Python.

Then another comment asked "but wouldn't you say there's an overhead to the developer using a language like C where you can easily shoot yourself in the foot if you're not careful?"

To this, Musk replied: "Indeed, unless you need to optimize for hardware performance, it is best not to use C."

As one of the world's leading artificial intelligence research laboratories, OpenAI has achieved parity with other heavyweight AI companies such as Alphabet's DeepMind in just 4 years. As a popular figure who is also committed to the field of artificial intelligence, Musk is also the darling of Silicon Valley.

Musk is also the CEO & CTO of SpaceX and CEO of Tesla (TESLA). It is said that SpaceX has only used Rust to build prototypes for some new projects. Now Musk calls himself Rust's "" fans", could there be more projects using Rust in the future?

Combined with last month, foreign media reported that he had just denounced social media coverage of his travel activities as "becoming a security issue", so if security is concerned, Rust will also solve the C language to some extent. "Hazardous", so whether most of Musk's next projects will use the Rust language, we can look forward to it first.

In recent years, the "Mr. Ma" has continued to explore other related fields, such as humanoid robots, 7nm AI chips, and the long-planned "brain-computer interface" project. Although the outside world's evaluation of him is polarized, it has to be said that Musk's attempts in the direction of promoting the progress of human science and technology are very inspiring. What do you think about this? Welcome to exchange and interact in the comment area.