zig VS rust

Programming Languages: Go, Rust, Zig

At the same time, in the internal Slack of the company I work for, my colleague asked the security team whether we have any policies about the apps, as they'd like to start using Ghostty as their terminal emulator. I took a look at it, and it immediately caught my attention: a fresh look, a zero-config setup, platform-native UI (discovered in details in the “Ghostty Is Native—So What?” post by Gregory Anders) and GPU acceleration, and FOSS with very permissive MIT license (here is the GitHub repo). I googled the author (Mitchell Hashimoto), and discovered that he is a co-founder of HashiCorp, that brought Terraform, Vargant, Consult, Vault, and others to the world. That's quite a list. And, last but not the least, Zig as the main programming language was an interesting factor as well.

I'm not sure which language will be more mainstream in the future between these two. Maybe Zig(https://ziglang.org) can be some contender in the future, but not now at least - it could be a good contender at least it shows OOP grammar as simple as Python, internalizing vtable. For C++ and Rust, at least for me Rust is more like "you MUST do this" while C++ is like "you CAN do it also in this way." While one is highly opinionated, the other is unopinionated at all(that is to say, at least for me. your opinions are always welcome). And that may be one of the reasons that I don't like Qt? :D Maybe C++ is still superset of Rust in some way (it's just "in some way", because there are things unique in Rust language itself. For example, Rust trait can be mimicked with template class and combination of C++ enum and template class can behave like class-associated Rust enum, but C++ doesn't have anything equivalent or similar to borrow checker).

Zig compiler pipeline (AST, Zir, Air, Sema) does exactly this on all layers. Not only contiguous, but instead of array-of-structs it is struct-of-arrays, so walking the tree is even more cache friendly. For AST see: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/blob/master/lib/std/zig/Ast.z...

Yes, please read the comment linked at the issue description: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/16270#issuecomment-161...

A few notes:

1) Lack of a garbage collector does not make your program faster, it makes the performance more easily predictable in terms of latency.

It also makes it more friendly for memory bandwidth, CPU cache and to overall memory usage, which in turn results in better performance in real-case scenarios vs synthetic/toy benchmarks. This is particularly noticeable in constrained environments (like embedded systems).

2) Zig was never about memory safety, and it is not a memory-safe language.

It might have better plumbing than C, it might add better way to implement and abstract concepts.. but so does C++, for instance.

The more striking differences between C++ and Zig, IMHO, are syntax and the ability to use the same language instead of a separate one to do meta-programming (templates vs comptime).

3) Aliasing enforcement in Rust is there for a reason.

Two examples I quickly found on Zig's issue tracker:

https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/3696

I'll tell you my experience with Zig. I don't have any. I saw maybe Primagen talking about it and I see your post here. I watched 10 minutes of your vimeo video. I see it has 30k+ stars on github. So now I have to try to understand it in a nutshell.

First like any language, I go to indeed.com and put in "Zig" to see if there are any jobs listed which use it. I don't see any.

Then I click to https://ziglang.org/ and it describes Zig as "robust, optimal and reusable". Well that doesn't really say much of anything.

I read the example listed, which appears to be a test case, and I wonder how the 'try' mechanism works without a 'catch'

Then I go to https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/ and see that it says:

> will that function also get to return a u8?

No, the main function (the entry point of the entire program) is special cased. Have a look at the source code. There you can see the it's calling the user defined main function and handling its return value / error.

https://github.com/ziglang/zig/blob/2d888a8e639856e8cb6e4c6f...

> Also, what happened to argv/argc?

You can access argv with std.os.argv which is a slice of null terminated strings. It's better to go with std.process.argsAlloc though (requires an allocation but works on all supported platforms).

The esp-template issue might be this one: https://github.com/esp-rs/rust/issues/158. Try with --release or updating to 1.68.0 with espup update. I'll take a look at the log as soon as I can, atm Im on the phone and is not that easy to scroll through :(

Sure. Espressif maintains a fork which adds support for their microcontrollers.

I am trying to make a vaccine passport validation for my country using the ESP32 for my micro controller. I have gotten the std rust library to compile using (esp-rs)[https://github.com/esp-rs/rust], but the actual validation library that I use needs openssl which refuses to compile.

Xtensa. They've got a fork of LLVM that supports it that they're working toward getting upstreamed. The community has a fork of rustc that uses it (and a quickstart crate) while we wait for it to get upstreamed.

It only works if you have an Xtensa compiler which takes hours to compile, here: Rust Xtensa (if you don't have it). The network driver is just a function that sets the name of the driver so the Esp32 does something other that blinking.