Why Zig Is Quietly Doing What Rust Couldn't: Staying Simple

This was posted less than 2 weeks ago. Why bother doing it again?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45849204

Considering language syntax proposals aren’t accepted anymore and they have a culture of being minimal I believe it will remain so.

Perl too was refreshingly simple and DWIM(Do What I Mean).

And then it wasn't.

I know this post is AI generated to some extent but I'm still curious. The subtitle says:

> Rust shouted about safety. Zig just built it — without the ceremony, the sermons, or the 15-minute compile times.

Which I interpret as meaning that zig delivers memory safety in a simpler way than rust. But a few paragraphs in, it says:

> Rust teaches you ownership like a tough-love therapist. Zig, meanwhile, just shrugs and says, "You break it, you fix it." That's the philosophical divide. Rust assumes you can't be trusted. Zig assumes you're an adult.

Does this mean that zig's safety depends on trusting the programmer to write correct code? This wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing if zig makes correct code simple to write or has other advantages, but if incorrect code is allowed it makes sense why the compiler can be more permissive and I wouldn't say it's quite delivered the same thing as Rust.

Ok, another thing:

> Zig looks boring. Feels boring. Reads like a C project written by someone who finally went to therapy.

    pub fn main() void {
        const stdout = std.io.getStdOut().writer();
        stdout.print("Hello, World!\n", .{}) catch unreachable;
    }

> That's it. No macros. No build.rs. No Cargo screaming about outdated crates.

Am I crazy or does this not actually look simpler than

    fn main() {
        println!("Hello, world!");
    }

Is the zig version doing something other than hello world? Or did the author, in their post about how zig is simpler and more readable than rust, choose a code example where the corresponding rust code would be much simpler and more readable?