[the__alchemist]

> Rust is not and has never been "make literally everything safe", it's "push the unsafe boundary as low as possible and keep as much as possible above it so that you can reduce the surface area for unsafety and more easily find bugs in the unsafe code".

Another definition: Rust is a lang to "Run fast and low-level software/firmware, with nicer tools, features, and syntax than the other langs which can do this"!

Obviously, the value proposition you find in this case depends on the subjective nature of that regarding rust vs zig!

[saghm]

I don't think I agree with this framing because "definition" implies comprehensiveness in a way that "here are some properties which may not cover everything that's relevant" does not. Your "definition" implicitly ignores the safety mechanism that Rust has and Zig lacks, which does a lot of rhetorical work into making it seem like the only difference is in "flavor" rather than "substance". My argument that there is a meaningful difference in substance, just not the one that the parent comment (and plenty of others) expected.

[the__alchemist]

Semantics on "definition".

"safety" is not why I use and love it. I brought this up because someone who hasn't used Rust, but reads about it may assume it's a "safe" language; I would describe it instead as a nice all-around language.

[saghm]

I don't know if I totally agree with your characterization here either. I'd argue that if you're not actively writing unsafe code, then you are using it as a safe language, in the same way that Python and Java are also safe languages. Yes, I also think it's a quite nice language, but safety is important enough that any time you're comparing a language that can be used safely to one that fundamentally can't enforce safety, framing the choice as purely ergonomic (even implicitly) is misleading.