Rust is dead. Haven’t you heard? We’re rewriting everything in Zig now.
I don’t think the broader zig community has the rewrite spirit that the rust community has. For Rust, this mentality was also motivated by an increased security, which zig does improve over plain C, but not to the extent Rust does.
To preface anything that follows, I’m not a developer, so this is little-informed opinion.
Writing in rust just doesn’t seem very enjoyable. It’s a language with security in mind, which is a good thing. However, zig also isn’t inherently insecure (though it doesn’t provide the same security guarantees) and coding in it just seems so much more pleasant. To me, the language makes more sense, which is also something I like about Go. Even manual memory allocation looks well-designed. At no point did I look at zig and thought “oh, that’s an odd choice”.
The language isn’t frozen yet though, so everything you write in it may require changes later on, so I wouldn’t recommend it for anything in production. Notably, there’s no built-in async or something comparable. If you’re fine with these limitations, go ahead and try it out, and if you feel like it, maybe even rewrite an existing tool in it.
ncdu for example is such a tool where the original author rewrote it in zig for version 2.
I now write basically all of my projects in Rust because I find the language so enjoyable. I like it so much that it has ruined my desire to continue working on existing projects… because they aren’t written in Rust.
Years ago, after over a decade making fistfuls of money as a Java developer and yet becoming almost physically nauseous at the idea of having to look at more Java code, I did a survey of possible ships to jump to. I was on the management track by that point - still more level enough to have my hand in - but salaries weren’t a huge factor. So I wrote a series of projects in three upcoming languages at the time: Vala, Rust, and Go.
I don’t remember now why Vala dropped out so quickly; I think it was some unsavory dependency or relationship with Gnome libraries, but honestly I don’t recall.
But I hated Rust. It felt like a language I was constantly fighting with, and simple, common things were just hard. And it’s not like I didn’t have experience with other paradigms; I cut my teeth on C and Pascal, did a fair amount of Scheme in college, actually implemented a project in Haskell that went into production at one company (and, for that, I sincerely apologize to every developer who worked there after me), and was part of a team that built an ETL engine for what qualifies as “big data” in Erlang at another.
Rust was the worst developer experience of them all, including Erlang, and that’s saying something.
Go was stupid easy to write, and more importantly, to understand other people’s code, and relatively hard to write bad code in. It’s gotten worse over time (Go generics are practically useless compared to the amount of cognitive complexity they add) but that’s the hubris of language developers: they can’t resist adding new crap that’s just enshittifies the language. Although, in the case of generics, there was a solid decade of pressure, mostly new converts who hadn’t yet learned they are entirely unnecessary, to add generics, so I don’t really blame the Go team for that one. And, for the most part, they’ve avoided making large, bad additions.
In any case, I was roasting Rust, not Go.
I love the binaries from Rust projects: they’re small (smaller than Go, without the runtime overhead), they’re fast, and they’re usually statically linked. But the language itself is a nightmare, and the compile times are absurd, so it someone wants to give me a binary, fine. Otherwise, no thanks. Rust may be a “memory safe” language, but that doesn’t mean shit if the code isn’t auditable and people are just passing around binaries.
Re auditability: sure, a Rust programmer could audit a code base. But I’d argue that a non-Go developer with any experience with any C-ish language could audit a Go project and confirm that it’s not doing any sketchy things like calling out to a botnet. I doubt many people would claim the same for Rust.
I don’t think the broader zig community has the rewrite spirit that the rust community has. For Rust, this mentality was also motivated by an increased security, which zig does improve over plain C, but not to the extent Rust does.
To preface anything that follows, I’m not a developer, so this is little-informed opinion.
Writing in rust just doesn’t seem very enjoyable. It’s a language with security in mind, which is a good thing. However, zig also isn’t inherently insecure (though it doesn’t provide the same security guarantees) and coding in it just seems so much more pleasant. To me, the language makes more sense, which is also something I like about Go. Even manual memory allocation looks well-designed. At no point did I look at zig and thought “oh, that’s an odd choice”.
The language isn’t frozen yet though, so everything you write in it may require changes later on, so I wouldn’t recommend it for anything in production. Notably, there’s no built-in async or something comparable. If you’re fine with these limitations, go ahead and try it out, and if you feel like it, maybe even rewrite an existing tool in it.
ncdufor example is such a tool where the original author rewrote it in zig for version 2.Enjoyable is so subjective.
I now write basically all of my projects in Rust because I find the language so enjoyable. I like it so much that it has ruined my desire to continue working on existing projects… because they aren’t written in Rust.
I think we’re mostly on the same page.
Years ago, after over a decade making fistfuls of money as a Java developer and yet becoming almost physically nauseous at the idea of having to look at more Java code, I did a survey of possible ships to jump to. I was on the management track by that point - still more level enough to have my hand in - but salaries weren’t a huge factor. So I wrote a series of projects in three upcoming languages at the time: Vala, Rust, and Go.
I don’t remember now why Vala dropped out so quickly; I think it was some unsavory dependency or relationship with Gnome libraries, but honestly I don’t recall.
But I hated Rust. It felt like a language I was constantly fighting with, and simple, common things were just hard. And it’s not like I didn’t have experience with other paradigms; I cut my teeth on C and Pascal, did a fair amount of Scheme in college, actually implemented a project in Haskell that went into production at one company (and, for that, I sincerely apologize to every developer who worked there after me), and was part of a team that built an ETL engine for what qualifies as “big data” in Erlang at another.
Rust was the worst developer experience of them all, including Erlang, and that’s saying something.
Go was stupid easy to write, and more importantly, to understand other people’s code, and relatively hard to write bad code in. It’s gotten worse over time (Go generics are practically useless compared to the amount of cognitive complexity they add) but that’s the hubris of language developers: they can’t resist adding new crap that’s just enshittifies the language. Although, in the case of generics, there was a solid decade of pressure, mostly new converts who hadn’t yet learned they are entirely unnecessary, to add generics, so I don’t really blame the Go team for that one. And, for the most part, they’ve avoided making large, bad additions.
In any case, I was roasting Rust, not Go.
I love the binaries from Rust projects: they’re small (smaller than Go, without the runtime overhead), they’re fast, and they’re usually statically linked. But the language itself is a nightmare, and the compile times are absurd, so it someone wants to give me a binary, fine. Otherwise, no thanks. Rust may be a “memory safe” language, but that doesn’t mean shit if the code isn’t auditable and people are just passing around binaries.
Re auditability: sure, a Rust programmer could audit a code base. But I’d argue that a non-Go developer with any experience with any C-ish language could audit a Go project and confirm that it’s not doing any sketchy things like calling out to a botnet. I doubt many people would claim the same for Rust.