Rust

Rewriting one hot path — the chunking engine behind Driftwood — because the profiler kept pointing at allocation overhead that a garbage-collected language wasn’t going to let me remove.

The borrow-checker pain is front-loaded. The first week fighting the compiler over ownership felt like a tax; by the second, most of the fights were catching real bugs — a buffer being read after it was supposed to be freed — that would have shipped in the old implementation as a rare, hard-to-reproduce corruption.

It’s staying in trial, not adopt, until I’ve used it on a second project. One hot path proving out is a good sign, not yet a pattern.