That’s a fair point — performance-wise, traditional backbones are incredibly hard to beat.
But maybe the value of Yggdrasil isn’t in outrunning the backbone — it’s in outlasting it. In unstable or disconnected environments, resilience, autonomy, and zero-setup connectivity might matter more than raw speed.
So perhaps it's not about replacement, but complement — building networks that keep working when the backbone doesn't.
Seeing an entire function compiled down to a single ud2 instruction in Compiler Explorer was the moment I truly grasped the power of undefined behavior.
Templates are just tools — but undefined behavior (UB) is the real shadow lord. That seemingly innocent line of C++ code you wrote? The compiler might decide it has no meaning at all and emit ud2 — a deliberate “invalid operation” that crashes the program.
This isn’t just a language “gotcha”; it’s the compiler shouting:
“Your code makes no sense to me — so I’m terminating it with prejudice.”
It’s both technically fascinating and philosophically unsettling.
Who should bear the burden of balancing performance and safety?
Should we be more careful developers, or should the language take more responsibility?
Or… is this precisely the case for Rust?
The compiler didn’t betray you. It simply honored your undefined contract.