Assorted Thoughts on Zig and Rust
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Assorted Thoughts on Zig and Rust
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Re: Assorted Thoughts on Zig and Rust
#2I quite honestly wonder sometimes why Rust excited me so much when I first started using it, but I do not get such excitement from Zig. Nowadays it's very easy to be excited about Rust because it demonstrated that ownership works but when I started using it, there was still garbage collection etc.
Zig looks really cool but it feels like it has a high chance of being a niche language. Rust never felt like that.
Re: Assorted Thoughts on Zig and Rust
#3I quite honestly wonder sometimes why Rust excited me so much when I first started using it, but I do not get such excitement from Zig. Nowadays it's very easy to be excited about Rust because it demonstrated that ownership works but when I started using it, there was still garbage collection etc. Zig looks really cool but it feels like it has a high chance of being a niche language. Rust never felt like that.
Maybe it's because Rust is backed by Mozilla, which is a bigger player than Zig's creator?
Re: Assorted Thoughts on Zig and Rust
#4I quite honestly wonder sometimes why Rust excited me so much when I first started using it, but I do not get such excitement from Zig. Nowadays it's very easy to be excited about Rust because it demonstrated that ownership works but when I started using it, there was still garbage collection etc. Zig looks really cool but it feels like it has a high chance of being a niche language. Rust never felt like that.
While Zig is an awesome project I feel a little bit the same. My two cents are that it is because Zig, as innovative as it is, has nothing that other languages couldn't copy or assimilate. With Rust it is a different story, because the ownership model cannot be plugged into other languages without changing them fundamentally. My prediction is similar to yours that Zig will be an important research project but not go mainstream. A counterargument is of course that Zig's closeness to C will make it win in conservative industries and it wouldn't be the first time a more incremental approach wins over the more innovative one. Also I have to stress that I only have a cursory knowledge of Zig so far. I hope I didn't do the language injustice and I'd like to hear other opinions about this.
Re: Assorted Thoughts on Zig and Rust
#5I quite honestly wonder sometimes why Rust excited me so much when I first started using it, but I do not get such excitement from Zig. Nowadays it's very easy to be excited about Rust because it demonstrated that ownership works but when I started using it, there was still garbage collection etc. Zig looks really cool but it feels like it has a high chance of being a niche language. Rust never felt like that.
Maybe it's because Rust is backed by Mozilla, which is a bigger player than Zig's creator?
That if anything would have made me more suspicious. Mozilla had and still has an awful track record of keeping projects alive.
Re: Assorted Thoughts on Zig and Rust
#6I quite honestly wonder sometimes why Rust excited me so much when I first started using it, but I do not get such excitement from Zig. Nowadays it's very easy to be excited about Rust because it demonstrated that ownership works but when I started using it, there was still garbage collection etc. Zig looks really cool but it feels like it has a high chance of being a niche language. Rust never felt like that.
It might be the timing that matters. The very needs for safe and friendly system programming arose---or rather became clear---around 2010, when both Rust (0.1) and Go appeared. Having appeared 5 years later, Zig can be seen as a follower (a very great one, of course) and may no longer give much excitement as Rust did.
Re: Assorted Thoughts on Zig and Rust
#7I quite honestly wonder sometimes why Rust excited me so much when I first started using it, but I do not get such excitement from Zig. Nowadays it's very easy to be excited about Rust because it demonstrated that ownership works but when I started using it, there was still garbage collection etc. Zig looks really cool but it feels like it has a high chance of being a niche language. Rust never felt like that.
Maybe it's because Rust is backed by Mozilla, which is a bigger player than Zig's creator?
[deleted]
Re: Assorted Thoughts on Zig and Rust
#8I quite honestly wonder sometimes why Rust excited me so much when I first started using it, but I do not get such excitement from Zig. Nowadays it's very easy to be excited about Rust because it demonstrated that ownership works but when I started using it, there was still garbage collection etc. Zig looks really cool but it feels like it has a high chance of being a niche language. Rust never felt like that.
Maybe it's because Rust is backed by Mozilla, which is a bigger player than Zig's creator?
Rust is currently backed more by Amazon and Microsoft than it is by Mozilla. The main contribution of Mozilla is to hold the trademark on behalf of the Rust project.
Re: Assorted Thoughts on Zig and Rust
#9I quite honestly wonder sometimes why Rust excited me so much when I first started using it, but I do not get such excitement from Zig. Nowadays it's very easy to be excited about Rust because it demonstrated that ownership works but when I started using it, there was still garbage collection etc. Zig looks really cool but it feels like it has a high chance of being a niche language. Rust never felt like that.
While Zig is an awesome project I feel a little bit the same. My two cents are that it is because Zig, as innovative as it is, has nothing that other languages couldn't copy or assimilate. With Rust it is a different story, because the ownership model cannot be plugged into other languages without changing them fundamentally. My prediction is similar to yours that Zig will be an important research project but not go…
> has nothing that other languages couldn't copy or assimilate.
You cannot "copy" simplicity into a complex language. (Not trying to start a discussions about whether or not Rust is complicated.)
Re: Assorted Thoughts on Zig and Rust
#10I enjoy Rust and have been writing it for quite some time. However, I feel like server side languages still have a long way to go. Client-side languages in comparison have been only growing better (one could make a lot of negative points about TypeScript and node in general, but the ecosystem is a joy to work with). I feel like this is because people have accepted C and C++ with their respective pain points for close to 50 years now, because there really were no viable contenders. I like how this is starting to change.
I still feel Rust, Nim and Zig kind of get the right ideas, but they are not there just yet. I like rust with it's expliciteness and correctness, but I wish some stricter features were opt-in. I do not feel that the borrow checker is the ultimate solution to safety problems. Its strictness can make working with Rust a pain. As the author demonstrates, sometimes you know what you want to do and how to write it in other languages, but it can take quite a while to get it down in such a way that the rust compiler will accept it.
I think enabling a language to be garbage collected in general, while making a borrow checker opt in for special, time critical functions is the best of both worlds. I also think Rust may focus a bit too much on the terseness of its syntax. This can make modern Rust hard to read because there are so many special tokens.