Why Zig Is Quietly Doing What Rust Couldn't: Staying Simple

I know this post is AI generated to some extent but I'm still curious. The subtitle says:

> Rust shouted about safety. Zig just built it — without the ceremony, the sermons, or the 15-minute compile times.

Which I interpret as meaning that zig delivers memory safety in a simpler way than rust. But a few paragraphs in, it says:

> Rust teaches you ownership like a tough-love therapist. Zig, meanwhile, just shrugs and says, "You break it, you fix it." That's the philosophical divide. Rust assumes you can't be trusted. Zig assumes you're an adult.

Does this mean that zig's safety depends on trusting the programmer to write correct code? This wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing if zig makes correct code simple to write or has other advantages, but if incorrect code is allowed it makes sense why the compiler can be more permissive and I wouldn't say it's quite delivered the same thing as Rust.

Ok, another thing:

> Zig looks boring. Feels boring. Reads like a C project written by someone who finally went to therapy.

    pub fn main() void {
        const stdout = std.io.getStdOut().writer();
        stdout.print("Hello, World!\n", .{}) catch unreachable;
    }

Am I crazy or does this not actually look simpler than

    fn main() {
        println!("Hello, world!");
    }

> Rust shouted about safety. Zig just built it

This makes it sound like Zig built Rust equivalent safety but its manual memory model suggests otherwise?

>Zig, meanwhile, just shrugs and says, "You break it, you fix it."<

Exactly. That’s what Rust defends us from. It makes breaking things way harder. Rust forces you to think differently, you cannot just do what you want, but that’s it’s selling point. The article focuses mainly on feelings not facts and that’s ok, but I don’t feel exhausted writing Rust. I like that it’s safe and I’m happy to sacrifice some freedom if I get safety in return.

That’s a weird article. Rust wanted to be safe systems language and it is. Where’s the issue? Zig has different goals. That’s ok. What are actually discussing here?

This was posted less than 2 weeks ago. Why bother doing it again?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45849204

Seems to be hugged to death: https://archive.is/UauYs

Yeah, this is AI.

"1. Rust Promised Us Heaven. Then Gave Us Paperwork.

Remember the hype? Rust was the "C killer." The messiah of memory safety. The savior of systems programming."

Until it gets widely adopted and people want to have certain feature, etc.

Perl too was refreshingly simple and DWIM(Do What I Mean).

And then it wasn't.

Reads like a straw man. Was "being simple" anywhere in rust lang agenda?

I like the article's theme. Coding in Rust does indeed suck brain-power and even after 2 years of off-and-on attempts, I am still faster (and less tired) in other languages (including C++). But the LLM generated text is just deeply pissing me off, sorry. Why use snarky LLM slop here ? Use straightforward, ordinary human-developer language for this.

I stopped reading when he compared the Rust compiler to his angry ex.

Like, what are we doing.

This “article” is flame bait.

Zig has no undefined behavior?

Freedium is down, you may be able to read this using Medium instead: https://medium.com/@daxx5/why-zig-is-quietly-doing-what-rust...

I could only see the first few paragraphs, but the writing is giving off a lot of "AI slop" vibes (or perhaps even "human-written slop", let's give the author the benefit of the doubt). So maybe it's no great loss if it's behind a Medium paywall.

AI generated slop...

A thought: is using Rust a form of avoiding responsability?

And a second thought since the article seems to be flagged now: considering the fan reaction to a post disparaging their favorite language, how is the Rust community different from a religious cult now?