The CPU’s that we use for computers used to roughly double in speed (transistor density) every two years according to something called Moore’s law. This stopped happening around 2013/2014. Some innovations are being made, but right now progress is stagnating. There are a few implications:
1: You can probably keep your old laptop around for longer
2: Programmers have to start writing better, faster code to do more interesting things on single CPU’s
3: For really complicated stuff, we’ll just start trying to use as many CPU’s in parallel as possible (Machine Learning with multi hundred core GPU‘s, server farms, multi-threading, etc.)
For point number 2: Programmers are going to have to start coding closer to the metal. This is possible with C and C++, but the complexity of dealing with pointers and memory safety is difficult to do well consistently with complex programs.
Enter Rust: “a language for the next 40 years” that promises readability similar to Java, run-time similar or sometimes better than C code, and memory safety.
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