What Zig felt like, coming from Rust

In one line

What Zig felt like, coming from Rust Intro I’ve spent the last 7 years as a Rust developer, working mostly on open source projects, and I’d like to think I’ve built a solid feel for the language and its ecosystem along the way.

Opening excerpt

I’ve spent the last 7 years as a Rust developer, working mostly on open source projects, and I’d like to think I’ve built a solid feel for the language and its ecosystem along the way. I gravitate toward the functional side of Rust like clean functions, expressive types, that sort of thing. But I’m always curious about other languages, and Zig has been on my radar for a while as a candidate C successor: lower-level, lighter-weight, and steadily earning its place among the languages people take seriously. I spent time with C earlier in my career, so the comparison always felt like it would be interesting to make.

One caveat worth stating up front: my experience with Zig begins with this project. Some of the observations will look naive and obvious for the people who work with Zig on daily basis and some of the decisions I made along the way were almost certainly not the optimal ones, they were shaped more by habits carried over from Rust than by deep Zig idiom.

To make the comparison fair, I decided to reimplement something I’d already built in Rust, not a toy, but not a sprawling …

(Excerpted from the original; full article via the source link below.)

This story hit the Hacker News front page today (166 points / 197 comments, via besok.github.io). Our Tech Radar aggregates daily signals on AI engineering, backend architecture and DevOps — browse the related services and further reading below, or get in touch with our team.