[your_fin]

Very roughly, Zig is much closer to Go in terms of philosophy of language design, where as Rust is much closer to Go in terms of the kind of software people write with it.

Go and Zig are both aggressively small and portable languages, and e.g. prefer explicit `defer` where Rust would handle cleanup implicitly. Unlike Zig, Go and Rust are both widely used and mature ~tier-1 languages with a deep bench of native libraries. However, there's a deep gulf between their philosophies. Go values a shallow learning curve and making code easy to write, whereas Rust values expressivness and making it hard to write bad code. This is not to say that you can't write Good Software in Go or make money with Rust code. However, the languages tend to attract distinct groups of programmers, and there's a reason flamewars crop up between their proponents with unusual regularity.

Zig is notable for targeting C's niches of having lots of structural flexibility in memory management, being good at calling C code, and building C programs. C is the native language of most truly powerful interfaces (operating systems, graphics, cryptography, databases, other programming languages, device drivers, low-level networking, etc.), and programs primarily concerned with interfacing with such things tend to be better off written in C. Working with C code is in the happy path for Zig, while other mainstream programming languages demand significant specialized expertise or wrapper libraries (1). Wrapper libraries aren't always available, are almost always less useful than the original, and only save you /some/ build headaches. This makes Zig a candidate in many situations where C - and /maybe/ C++ - are the only real competition.

In short:

If your interest is learning new ways to think about writing programs, Rust will give you a more distinct perspective than Zig. Like Go, there will be lots of libraries and guides to help you out.

If your interest is in learning to write a kind of program you couldn't in Go and think "closer to the metal", Zig is likely better suited to task.

(1): This isn't nearly as true for C++, but there's still enough impeadence mismatch between idiomatic C and C++ to invite interfacing bugs and wrapper libraries.

[baranul]

Other languages are much closer to Go than Zig. A few are Vlang (highest percentage), Odin, and C3 (in terms of how Zig is compared). In terms of C interoperability, C3 (highest percentage) and Vlang make this a strong feature of their languages too. All, in this group, have aspirations of being used "closer to the metal". For instance, there is the Vinix OS[1], from Vlang.

Rust coming across as a bit different, from those used to C family languages, has arguably a lot to do with its OCaml[2] (ML) roots.

[1]: https://github.com/vlang/vinix

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCaml

[johntash]

Thanks for the explanations!

I do really like Go's simplicity which is part of why Zig sounded interesting to me. Rust is definitely more mature though and "feels" more useful from the outside, but that could also just be all of the "I rewrote X in Rust" projects out there.

I'm surprised to see that Zig is closer to C than Rust, and also surprised that rust isn't _more_ like go. I'll probably start with rust just to try something different.

Like another commenter mentioned, I'm probably going to end up making a couple toy projects in both just to try them out. I don't have much of a reason for either of them at work, so it's just for personal projects and knowledge.