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by ksec 294 days ago
That is actually a valid point on expectation given the attracted people's demographic.

I will hopefully wait for comments from Ghostty, Bun or Tigerbeetle Devs.

On another point that is wroth mentioning, I hope Andrew will at least put it out publicly, IMO Zig isn't Anti-Rust. But it did attract the type of people who are not too happy with Rust. I dont remember a single time Zig came out to bash anything about Rust. It isn't Anti anything at all. Its goal is to be a decent C replacement as very high level assembly languages, aiming at Data Oriented Design with some interesting features, and extremely fast compilation speed. ( Which was the reason why I was interested in it in the first place. I miss Turbo Pascal )

Zig reminds me of the old school, traditional projects. It isn't perfect for everything, it never claims to be, if you like it, use it. If not, there are plenty of options out there.

At least Ghostty Dev seems to be enjoying it almost every day.

1 comments

I don't think Andrew is anti-Rust. But Loris, whose hn profile says he's “vp of community of the zig software foundation” is as anti-Rust as you can get: he's pathologically obsessed by Rust and spent significant amount of energy outright insulting Rust maintainers here or on Twitter (when he's not buzzy writing anti-Rust rant on his blog).

But as you say, there's no reason why Zig ought to be anti-Rust, both language are are fresh attempts at low level programming, both highly opinionated and with very different philosophies and trade offs and both language can cohabit peacefully (I've heard good things about using the Zig toolchain for cross compilation of C dependencies in rust projects, so the existence of Zig already has had a positive impact on the Rust ecosystem).

Huh, it all started with a Rust developer ceaselessly picking on Zig been memory-unsafe on social media. It would be one thing to write some technical post and be done with it but this obsession with Zig by Rust dev was infuriating to put it mildly. The same dev was very anti-Go in past and would post endless comments on Go here and elsewhere.
I used to follow pcwalton on Twitter back then (before it became a nazi bar) and that's a complete mischaracterization.

While he can get petty when talking about memory safety, he was never obsessed by Zig in any way, his tweet that ended up with Loris calling him “Coomer” among other names was a response to someone mentioning that Zig wasn't memory safe. I've never seen him mentioning Zig first on Twitter.

And on the other hand you have Loris, obsessed so much by Rust he can't help spawning in Rust threads or write dumb anti-rust rants on his blog…

(In fairness, I must say that Loris isn't even the worst offender, that title goes to M. Presler, who keeps spawning every Rust thread telling everyone who want to hear it that Zig is much better, despite having seemingly no stakes in the game (being a Java guy and having no public Zig contribution or even documented use of the langage). Sounds like the “Rust evangelical strike force” emotionally hurt a bunch of people so much they became lifetime haters).