DHH says Rust is ~150x faster than Rails; devs find an unequal benchmark
At Rails World 2026 in late September, Ruby on Rails creator DHH said he stopped hand-writing code about four months ago and announced that 37signals' HEY will move to native clients with a Rust-rewritten backend. He then published a multi-language Campfire benchmark claiming Rust hit 36,260 requests per second on a chat-room page load — roughly 150x Rails, 50x Elixir and 9.4x Go. Developers who inspected the public repos found the Rust version had accumulated 398 commits in six days (380 by DHH) versus 3 each for Elixir and Go, with different task instructions for each agent, and called the comparison unfair. DHH responded that he didn't intervene in the implementations and only asked frontier agents to maximize performance.
The dispute surfaces how language choice and benchmarks should be judged when agents write the code and humans no longer read it.
“我发自内心地讨厌 Rust。每次看 Rust 代码，我都觉得像有人把酸液倒进了我的眼睛。”
9 月底的 Rails World 2026 上，Ruby on Rails 创始人 David Heinemeier Hansson（DHH）站在台上，把 Rust 称为“过去 40 年里发明的最丑陋的编程语言”。
“如果让人类亲自编写，它就是一种糟糕、糟糕、糟糕透顶的编程语言。要求有血有肉的人类用自己的眼睛承受这些代码，简直毫无人性。”
然而几句话之后，DHH 话锋一转：“但如果我永远不用看这些代码，只需要享受应用快上 30 倍甚至 100 倍，编译出极小的可执行文件，并在不到一毫秒内启动，那我爱 Rust！”
“Agent 喜欢 Rust，这正好形成了完美的分工：我告诉它要做什么，它负责用 Rust 写出来，而我永远不用看那些代码。我很喜欢这种方式。”
两周后，DHH 用一张性能图表进一步证明自己的观点。他让 Agent 将 37signals 的群聊应用 Campfire 分别重写为 Elixir、Go 和 Rust 版本，再与原来的 Ruby on Rails 版本对比。结果中，Rust 几乎横扫全场。仅在加载聊天室页面这项测试中，Rust 就达到每秒 36260 个请求，大约是 Rails 的 150 倍、Elixir 的 50 倍、Go 的 9.4 倍。
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