zig VS rust

Finished up to 109.

Kinda sad that async is broken and there's a huge pile of gatekeeping requirements against bringing it back. https://github.com/ziglang/zig/wiki/FAQ#what-is-the-status-o...

Actually, nobody.

Here is the commit where Reader/Writer was introduced: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/commit/5e212db29cf9e2c06aba36...

This is a few months after `git init`. You can see I was really just working on the parser, with a toy example to get things started.

Over time, I merged contributions that made minor changes and shuffled things around, and these APIs evolved to kind of work okay. But nobody really considered "the Zig IO stack" as a whole and put in design effort. That is happening for the first time right now.

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

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?

> 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.

> 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.

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....

Rust development is experiencing major growth in 2025 as its developers continue to focus more on performance, memory safety, and reliability of their code. Supported by a powerful compiler, with modern tooling and an emerging ecosystem, Rust is an alternative to the majority of the limitations of legacy systems programming languages. This blog discusses the theoretical basis behind the transition to Rust-based development and the reasons why it is rapidly growing as an attractive option to software engineers and organizations.

https://www.rust-lang.org/ https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/ https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/getting-started/installation.html

I am very sorry, but you do not address that TBAA, like C has by default, generally is easier than just no aliasing, like what Rust has for mutable references. This is a major difference. C code can opt into a similar kind of aliasing, namely by using _restrict_, but that is opt-in, while it is always on for Rust.

And there is newer UB as well in Rust stdlib

https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/139553

Real-world programs can be verified by formally proving properties on a small part of the code (called the kernel) in a way that transitively guarantees those for the remaining code.

For example, Rust's borrow checker guarantees* memory safety of any code written in Rust, even a 10M+ LOC project. Another example is sel4, a formally-verified micro-kernel (https://sel4.systems/About/seL4-whitepaper.pdf).

* Technically not; even if the code doesn't use `unsafe`, not only is Rust's borrow checker not formally verified, there are soundness holes (https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues?q=is%3Aopen%20is%3A...). However, in theory it's possible to formally prove that a subset of Rust can only encode memory-safe programs, and in practice Rust's borrow checker is so effective that a 10M+ LOC project without unsafe will still probably not have memory issues.

Backend: Rust

What's weird about this?

To understand what evil_lincoln is doing, you have to understand very old Rust. Here's the commit that introduced it: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/commit/664b0ad3fcead4fe4d2...

    fn evil_lincoln() {

Side note: There's an effort to cache proc macro invocations so that they get executed only once if the item they annotate hasn't changed: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/129102

There are multiple caveats on providing this to users (we can't assume that macro invocations are idempotent, so the new behavior would have to be opt in, and this only benefits incremental compilation), but it's in our radar.

Rust: Install it from the official Rust website.