[noodledoodletwo]

I see where you are coming from, zig is easier to learn, but zig doesn't offer what rust does with respect to safety. That feature is so hard for me to ignore. I respect it though, some people want to be up and running with a new technology in a day or whatever, rust doesn't give you that unless you are very seasoned.

[throwawaymaths]

Honestly many applications don't need the level of safety that rust provides (for small single threaded cli apps or cloud lambdas, just allocate into an arena and throw everything away when the program quits, no UAF or DF because you're never freeing)

At the other extreme, if you're writing an operating system or a language VM, you probably want contextual allocators (like an allocator that takes a runtime argument like "which green thread I'm allocating on") which rust makes extremely difficult.

If you really need memory and resource safety I think the best answer is to be patient. Zig is very easy to parse and I imagine it will be the case that static analysis build tools will come about which can do what you want out of rust.... Being decoupled from the compiler chain you would be able to run fast but guard your prs to main/dev/release (as you see fit) with static analysis tools that will protect you with the safety you seek in an isomorphic fashion to "how rust does it". There's no reason why someone couldn't write it now, but with a lot of things (like ZIR/AIR) being highly unstable -- and these are what you're likely to want to statically analyze for such a tool -- for ones sanity I don't recommend building out a tool like that now.

[noodledoodletwo]

I actually disagree with that and think it encourages bad practices in people who don't know better. The rise of fuzz testing on these old c applications following this kind of mentality is a constant source of cves . Why expose users to problems, if it's easy not too?

Also it's not like that safety costs much of anything. You really can get comfortable writing rust, especially "easy rust" like a single thread cli app. It really is easy, even convenient.

Either zig is a different tool to rust, in which case I get it. Or people should be waiting for zig to be mature, meanwhile rust has been stable for half a decade, and at this point "just works". I'm not going to sit through an addendum static analyzer and all the bugs that come with making one for a few years. Other people whose appetite for risk is higher will though, and I wish them the best. I've seen efforts in other languages, my conclusion is that it's much better to have it built in...