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Comment by aeve890 | Hacker News Reader

>Every tool for the right job. If you are doing tons of scripting (for e.g. tests on platforms different than Rust), Python can be a solid valid alternative.

I'd say Go is a better alternative if you want to replace python scripting. Less friction and much faster compilation times than Rust.

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I am not a huge fan of Go, but if all the world's "serious" Python became Go, the average code quality would skyrocket, so I think I can agree to this proposal.

Go performance is terrible for numeric stuff though, no SIMD support.

There are Go SIMD libraries now, and there's also easy use of C libraries via Cgo.

(given the context of LLMs) Unless you're doing CPU-side inference for corner cases where GPU inference is worse, lack of SIMD isn't a huge issue.

There are libraries to write SIMD in Go now, but I think the better fix is being able to autovectorize during the LLVM IR optimization stage, so its available with multiple languages.

I think LLVM has it now, its just not super great yet.

That's not really true, but we're talking about a Python replacement for scripting tasks, not core compute tasks, anyway. It is not like Python is the paragon of SIMD support. Any real Python workloads end up being written in C for good reason, using Python only as the glue. Go can also interface with C code, and despite all the flack it gets for its C call overhead it is still significantly faster at calling C code than Python is.

For the record of people reading this, I wrote a multithreaded SIMD-heavy compute task in Go, and it suffered only 5% slowdown vs the original hand-optimized C++ version.

The low level SIMD stuff was called out to over the c FFI bridge; golang was used for the rest of the program.

Lots of packages out there using SIMD for lots of things.

You can always drop into straight assembly if you need to as well. Go's assembler DX is quite nice after you get used to it.

Go itself no, but luckily like in any compiler toolchain, there is an Assembler available.

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