rust VS zig

Compare rust vs zig and see what are their differences.

rust

Empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software. (by rust-lang)

zig

General-purpose programming language and toolchain for maintaining robust, optimal, and reusable software. (by ziglang)
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rust zig
2,844 896
104,363 39,460
1.2% 1.7%
10.0 10.0
1 day ago 7 days ago
Rust Zig
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later MIT License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

rust

Posts with mentions or reviews of rust. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2025-06-17.

zig

Posts with mentions or reviews of zig. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2025-06-17.
  • Bzip2 crate switches from C to 100% rust
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Jun 2025
    This list's Zig as an entry, despite the Zig project having very clear plans[0] for a 1.0 release. That's not 0ver, it's just the beta stage of semver.

    [0] https://github.com/ziglang/zig/milestone/2

  • Show HN: Dk – A script runner and cross-compiler, written in OCaml
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Jun 2025
    I usually structure teaching the same way done in https://www.writethedocs.org/videos/eu/2017/the-four-kinds-o.... So "the Quick Walkthrough Guide will explain what dk scripts are and give you small examples to run" is simply a learning-oriented tutorial which is mostly about giving students confidence and visual feedback. And simultaneously it an explanation of nothing (the video has a great explanation for why to do that). So, I agree that an explanation of threads + Internet + cross-compilation would quite nuts, but for an experienced developer I'd expect to see a meaty example (take a look at https://ziglang.org/ for comparison).

    One concrete action may be to make two distinct Quick Start guides ... one for the experienced and one for the inexperienced students though. Is that your thinking?

  • Zig Devlog: Self-Hosted x86 Back End Is Now Default in Debug Mode
    15 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 8 Jun 2025
  • Low-Level Optimization with Zig
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 7 Jun 2025
    > I feel like I can write powerful code in any language, but the goal is to write code for a framework that is most future proof, so that you can maintain modular stuff for decades.

    I like Zig a lot, but long-term maintainability and modularity is one of its weakest points IMHO.

    Zig is hostile to encapsulation. You cannot make struct members private: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/9909#issuecomment-9426...

    Key quote:

    > The idea of private fields and getter/setter methods was popularized by Java, but it is an anti-pattern. Fields are there; they exist. They are the data that underpins any abstraction. My recommendation is to name fields carefully and leave them as part of the public API, carefully documenting what they do.

    You cannot reasonably form API contracts (which are the foundation of software modularity) unless you can hide the internal representation. You need to be able to change the internal representation without breaking users. I hope Zig reverses this decision someday and supports private fields.

  • Why Use Structured Errors in Rust Applications?
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Jun 2025
    > Did Zig really do that?

    https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/544#issuecomment-61807...

    > In order to simplify everything, tabs are not allowed. Spaces are necessary; we can't ban spaces.

    They seem to be open to the alternative but not to a solution that isn't forced on people:

    > Maybe someday, we'll switch to tabs for indentation, spaces for alignment and make it a compile error if they are incorrectly mixed

    Zig already has a builtin code formatter that automatically changes formatting to their preference, but that's not enough.

  • A new language inspired by Go
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 29 May 2025
    Zig solved this by not having a string type at all and not shipping full Unicode support in std: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/234#issuecomment-27630....
  • Learning C3 (As a Zig User)
    7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 29 May 2025
  • What is Bun? The Node.js Alternative Explained
    1 project | dev.to | 28 May 2025
    Bun is written from scratch in Zig, a low-level language focused on performance and safety. Instead of using V8 (the engine behind Node and Deno), Bun runs on JavaScriptCore, the engine used in Safari. This choice helps it stay fast and efficient, both in terms of memory and startup time.
  • Convince OpenBSD developers to allow an executable get the path to itself (2020)
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 24 May 2025
  • Using unwrap() in Rust is Okay (2022)
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 21 May 2025
    > We discussed this in the meeting today and decided that we'll start by changing all => unreachable to => return error.Unexpected in std.posix and std.os.

    https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/6389#issuecomment-2895...

What are some alternatives?

When comparing rust and zig you can also consider the following projects:

carbon-lang - Carbon Language's main repository: documents, design, implementation, and related tools. (NOTE: Carbon Language is experimental; see README)

ssr-proxy-js - A Node.js tool for Server-Side Rendering (SSR) and Static Site Generation (SSG) using headless Chrome via Puppeteer

Odin - Odin Programming Language

Nim - Nim is a statically typed compiled systems programming language. It combines successful concepts from mature languages like Python, Ada and Modula. Its design focuses on efficiency, expressiveness, and elegance (in that order of priority).

v - Simple, fast, safe, compiled language for developing maintainable software. Compiles itself in <1s with zero library dependencies. Supports automatic C => V translation. https://vlang.io

InfluxDB – Built for High-Performance Time Series Workloads
InfluxDB 3 OSS is now GA. Transform, enrich, and act on time series data directly in the database. Automate critical tasks and eliminate the need to move data externally. Download now.
www.influxdata.com
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SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews
SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives
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Did you know that Rust is
the 5th most popular programming language
based on number of references?