Zig vs Rust. Which one is going to be future?

I think about pros and cons and what to choose for the second (modern) language in addition to C.

@programming@programming.dev

  • onlinepersona@programming.dev
    12·
    3 months ago

    Is zig memory safe by design? If not, rust will “win”. Large companies aren’t going to hire for an unknown or unpopular memory unsafe language when they already have C or C++ - there’s just no contest.

    Last I read, zig didn’t even have a standard string library. Unless that changes, it won’t even be a viable alternative to C/C++.

    Edit: I checked and got this

    the Zig language, like C, entrusts memory management to humans, placing full trust in human development. Zig then provides some memory safety checks to ensure memory safety. However, it still lacks the strict compile-time guarantees of Rust’s ownership system and borrow checker. Therefore, when writing Zig code, developers need to pay more attention to potential memory safety issues and ensure that errors and exceptional situations are handled correctly.

    Rust Magazine

    Anti Commercial-AI license

    • PushButton@lemmy.world
      02·
      3 months ago
      • Zig uses allocators, which will inform you if you are leaking memory.
      • Zig comes with defer/errdefer to simplify the resource cleanup (and for ergonomics).
      • Zig comes with Optionals to manage nulls.
      • Zig comes with slices (ptr + size) to manage all the bound-checking.
      • Zig automatically check for overflow/underflow arithmetic.
      • Zig will check for pointer alignments when casting between pointer types.

      => Zig is designed to make you do it right easily, and very hard to do it wrong.

      In other words, Zig will let you be, but warn you when you are doing something wrong, where Rust is like Karen who is always screaming at you for every word you are typing.

      To summarize, you really need to /want/ to fuck up to fail your memory management… If after all that you still can’t manage your memory, it might be better for you to look for another carer.

      Something is sure thou, Zig is very safe - just as it’s safe to cut my veggies with a knife. I might cut a finger and bleed a little bit, but I will not use plastic knife “because it’s safer”.

      Moreover; You are talking like if Rust is safe, all the time, which is not true in reality:

      52.5% of the popular crates have unsafe code. Therefore, in an average real-world Rust project, you can expect a significant number of the dependent crates to have unsafe code – Source

      Basically, you’re comparing a hypothetical world where Rust is always safe to a superficial glance at Zig’s capabilities to claim a “winner” here.

      And for the String library… Are you fucking serious? Do you want to compare the Zig’s Std library versus the famously tiny Rust Std library? Really?