There are lots of general-purpose models to use locally, and also coding-specific models.
But are there models specialized in one programming language? My thought was that a model that only needs to handle one language (e.g. Python) could be faster, or be better for a given size.
E.g If I need to code in Rust and is limited to an 8B model to run locally, I was hoping to get better results with a model that is narrower. I don’t need it to be able to help with Java.
This approach would of course require switching models, but that’s no problem for me.
I’d say it depends. Some patterns will be different. Like trying to create zig code when the LLM is trained mostly on javascript and python.