DHH's claim of Rust being nearly 150 times faster questioned; is code readability still worth pursuing after AI writes code?

Beating AI News Flash: DHH, the author of the famous Web development framework Rails, had AI port his company 37signals' chat software Campfire to Rust, Go, and Elixir. In initial tests, the Rust version handled about 36,000 chat room page requests per second, while the original Ruby version handled only about 240.

DHH previously favored Ruby, mainly valuing its development efficiency and code readability. He is now reconsidering: if AI is responsible for writing code and humans no longer read it line by line, is it still necessary to sacrifice runtime speed for development convenience?

Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch strongly supports this judgment. Vercel once spent 15 months porting about 70,000 lines of Go code from the build tool Turborepo to Rust. Although the team believed Rust was better suited for low-level system operations, the manual migration cost was too high, and the return on investment once sparked internal controversy. Rauch believes that AI has lowered the cost of writing code, and languages that were once convenient for human development may not still be the most cost-effective choice for companies.

But DHH's benchmark results were quickly questioned. After checking the code repository, Elixir founder José Valim found that the Rust version had gone through hundreds of commits and multiple rounds of performance optimization, while the Elixir version had basically remained in its first-port state. The architectures of the two were also different. Elixir concentrated database operations into a single process, while Rust used optimizations such as concurrent reads and caching. Such a test makes it difficult to prove how much of the performance gap actually comes from the language itself.

DHH responded that he asked top AI agents to maximize the performance of each language as much as possible. If the agent cannot find an optimization method for Elixir, that is also a problem that must be faced in actual development.

The community then continued to optimize different versions. A unified test updated on October 8 showed that the Rust version handled about 106,000 chat room page requests per second, while the Go version handled about 53,000, with Rust still about twice as fast.