zig VS rust

Compare zig vs rust and see what are their differences.

zig

General-purpose programming language and toolchain for maintaining robust, optimal, and reusable software. (by ziglang)

rust

Empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software. (by rust-lang)
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zig rust
862 2,783
37,106 101,153
4.1% 1.1%
10.0 10.0
6 days ago about 22 hours ago
Zig Rust
MIT License GNU General Public License v3.0 or later
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.

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 2025-02-08.
  • A tale of several distros joining forces for a common goal: reproducible builds
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 8 Feb 2025
    Regarding the reproducible bootstrapping problem, what is your project's policy on building from binary sources? For instance, Zig is written in zig and bootstraps from a binary wasm file which is translated to C: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/tree/master/stage1

    Golang has an even more complicated bootstrapping procedure requiring to build each successive version of the compiler to get to the most recent version.

  • Zig Guide
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 5 Feb 2025
    I love Zig and I love that it’s getting attention, but can someone convince me of its memory safety? One thing that surprised me is that returning pointers to stack-allocated memory doesn’t cause a compiler error — it just segfaults at runtime. This has been an open issue since 2019 [#2646](https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/2646).

    That, along with the number of memory-related issues in one of Zig’s most popular project, Bun.js [search: segfault](https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/issues?q=is%3Aissue+segfault), gives me pause.

  • Zig; what I think after months of using it
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 4 Feb 2025
    The duck typing argument is absolutely not based on minimal or missing documentation. There wouldn't be countless issues about it in the Zig repository if it were that simple. See https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/17198

    I'm simply going to quote one of the comments from the linked GitHub issue:

    > generic code is hard. Hard to implement correctly, hard to test, hard to use, hard to reason about. But, for better or worse, Zig has generics. That is something that cannot be ignored. The presence of generic capabilities means that generic code will be written; most of the std relies on generic code.

  • In Zig, What's a Writer?
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Feb 2025
    `appendSliceOptimized` is implemented using knowledge of the underlying writer, the way that say an interface implementation in Go would be able to. It's a big part of the reason that reading a file in Zig line-by-line can be so much slower than in other languages (2)

    (1) https://gist.github.com/karlseguin/1d189f683797b0ee00cdb8186...

    (2) https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/17985

  • Ask HN: What are some software projects with impressive websites?
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Jan 2025
    I am looking for some inspiration at websites for software projects that do a very good of job explaining their product right from the get go. Things like programming language or database home pages/docs or open source projects with good git READMEs.

    Though I've never used it, I think https://ziglang.org/ is a great example as it explains what makes the language unique, gives a code example right at the beginning, and makes it clear where to find more samples so I can quickly judge the features of the project without having to go through the entire docs.

    Maybe this is debatable, but I feel like https://kubernetes.io/ is a counter example. It's one of my favorite tools, but the home page doesn't tell me much. I think I would have liked to see code snippets about Deployments or some sort of architecture diagram that explains what it does in terms of different well established protocols like cri-o or cgroups or something.

    You might disagree with my examples above, but I'm still curious to see what other people consider "good".

  • LLDB for Zig
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Jan 2025
  • Development Environment Configuration
    20 projects | dev.to | 19 Jan 2025
    Programming Languages: Go, Rust, Zig
  • TIL: Ghostty — a new and quite promising terminal emulator
    7 projects | dev.to | 18 Jan 2025
    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.
  • C++ or Rust? I'd stick to my good old C++
    1 project | dev.to | 14 Jan 2025
    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).
  • Flattening ASTs (and Other Compiler Data Structures)
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 10 Jan 2025
    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...

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 2025-02-11.
  • Streaming Data from Cloud Storage with Mountpoint for Amazon S3
    6 projects | dev.to | 11 Feb 2025
    Mountpoint is a new FUSE based solution written in the Rust programming language and based on a Rust version of the Linux FUSE library. See here for an explanation of the choice of Rust. Other popular tools in the FUSE-based family of solutions are goofysand s3fs.
  • Ada crate of the year 2024 announced
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 9 Feb 2025
    Yep, and even without dynamic memory management, Ada is not type-safe: https://www.enyo.de/fw/notes/ada-type-safety.html

    Rust also has problems: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/25860

  • It Is Time to Standardize Principles and Practices for Software Memory Safety
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 6 Feb 2025
    The bug used by that repository [1] isn't the only one that can be used to escape the Safe Rust type system. There are a couple others I've tried [2] [3], and the Rust issue tracker currently lists 92 unsoundness bugs (though only some of them are general-purpose escapes), and that's only the ones we know about.

    These bugs are not really a problem in practice though as long as the developer is not malicious. However, they are a problem for supply chain security or any case where the Rust source is fully untrusted.

    [1]: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/25860

    [2]: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/57893

    [3]: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/133361

  • Roc Rewrites the Compiler in Zig
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 4 Feb 2025
    Since at least 2018, there's been a planned upgrade to the borrow checker to permit certain patterns that it currently rejects [0]. Also since 2018, there's been an implementation of the new version (called Polonius) that can be enabled with an unstable compiler flag [1].

    But it's 2025, and the new version still hasn't been enabled on stable Rust, since the Polonius implementation is seen as too slow for larger programs. A big goal of the types team since last year has been to reimplement a faster version within rustc [2].

    I'd count this as a language feature (albeit a relatively minor one) that's been greatly deferred in favor of shorter compile times.

    [0] https://blog.rust-lang.org/inside-rust/2023/10/06/polonius-u...

    [1] https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/51133

    [2] https://rust-lang.github.io/rust-project-goals/2024h2/Poloni...

  • Rust's worst feature (available in Rust nightly)
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 30 Jan 2025
    > Is there evidence more baking won't happen?

    No, actually there is a lot of evidence that it will still be worked on.

    Normally I would just say look at the issue linked in the nightly docs but due to an overlap of tacking PR and moving it from std to core PR it's not supper useful.

    Tracking Issue: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/78485

    If the author has constructive critique they should probably mention it there (after skimming through the discussion to make sure this wasn't already considered and not done due to subtleties they overlooked in the blog post (like e.g. that it's a standard/core feature which has to work across all targets and as such can't rely on anything being initialized to 0 by the OS, or that depending on the global allocator used you definitely can't rely on things being zeroed even if the OS only hands out zeroed memory, etc. etc.))

  • I've been advocating for RSS support, and you should too
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 18 Jan 2025
    I recently had the need to subscribe to changes to a Github repo and it turns out it provides a feed for them. For rust master branch, for example, subscribe to https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/commits/master.atom.
  • Rust's New Sort Algorithms
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Jan 2025
  • KEON is a human-readable serde format that syntactic similar to Rust
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Jan 2025
    With some notable exceptions. I'll never love the turbofish [1] for example.

    [1] https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/blob/master/tests/ui/parse...

  • 2025’s Must-Know Tech Stacks
    17 projects | dev.to | 11 Jan 2025
    Rust
  • Loco 0.14 on Cathyos: 始め方
    4 projects | dev.to | 10 Jan 2025

What are some alternatives?

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

Odin - Odin Programming Language

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

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

ssr-proxy-js - A Server-Side Rendering Proxy focused on customization and flexibility!

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).

go - The Go programming language

hylo - The Hylo programming language

Rustup - The Rust toolchain installer

Godot - Godot Engine – Multi-platform 2D and 3D game engine

Elixir - Elixir is a dynamic, functional language for building scalable and maintainable applications

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Did you know that Zig is
the 22nd most popular programming language
based on number of references?