[Zambyte]

In practice, almost all memory safety related bugs caught by the Rust compiler are caught by the Zig safe build modes at run time. This is strictly worse in isolation, but when you factor in the fact that the rest of the language is much easier to reason about, the better C interop, the simple yet powerful metaprogramming, and the great built in testing tools, the tradeoffs start to become a lot more interesting.

[dnautics]

catching at compile time is much better, though. there are plenty of strange situations that can happen that you'll not reach in runtime (for example, odds of running into a tripwire increase over time, things that can only happen after certain amount of memory fragmentation -- maybe you forgot an errdefer somewhere, etc.)