[_pdp_]

I am impartial on the matter, but I think one of the reasons Bun became a thing in the first place was because of Zig attracted a small but very active developer community. Switching from Zig to Rust effectively alienates that community.

[petcat]

I think the Zig people are really just worried that maybe Zig itself is a DOA language before it has even reached 1.0 because it doesn't offer enough over C for any serious use and their flagship project has now abandoned it.

[pmarreck]

Anyone actually using it knows it is better. The C interop is so good that there is no use-case where C is the better option IMHO

[59nadir]

You, by your own admission, haven't even written a single line of Zig despite having ~31 Zig projects on GitHub. I don't think your knowledge of the language is to be trusted in almost any capacity. This might seem harsh but I don't trust someone who's experience with a language amounts to slopping out 30+ repositories and not even engaging with the language normally.

[lstodd]

By my own admission I wrote ~100K loc in zig-head. Having a background in linux kernel development of all things I can tell you that Zig is so much better than C or Rust, that I think linux kernel rush to rust is misguided.

[59nadir]

I haven't even stated whether I agree with the opinion that Zig is worth it, in fact I do think Zig is worth it for a large set of problems and I wrote Zig for years, I am stating simply that I would never trust anyone who's self-admitting that they don't even write the language they're arguing for when it comes to opinions on whether it's good or not. It's not really about whether Zig is good, it's about someone who doesn't even write the language and doesn't even know it, not having a valuable opinion on it.

[pmarreck]

Same. In fact I think going to Zig, possibly on the way to Rust, would have been a far more pragmatic route.

But I guess my opinion is null and void since I "slop-code"

[pmarreck]

I guess that since you haven't built the car you're driving, your opinions on it are null and void as well.

Anyone who actually believes that I can't have ANY sound opinion on Zig after 31 projects building with it should get their head examined for brain tumors. I mean, it's not like I have to deal with all the positive and negative effects of things written in it. It's not like I've had to solve problems in it that emerged when the LLM didn't do things correctly (and yes, I can tell when this is so, and not just when things are buggy). And it's not like I don't know (by heart, not by LLM) at least 15 other languages that I can draw on (C, for example, for which I not only got an A in a class at Cornell once, but was in fact the person with the highest score in a class of ~150 people... A perfect score, in fact) to form valid opinions in combination with how I see Zig working.

So please take your baseless skepticism and baseless assumptions and shove them up your ass, dude. I have work to do, and I'm far more capable of it now than I was, thanks to the LLM boost.

[59nadir]

Honestly, I wasn't harsh enough... Though I don't think I could write a better post showing how useless your opinion on things actually is than the one you wrote yourself.

And no, I don't think you can have any valuable opinions on Zig since you don't write it. In your analogy you're not even driving the car, but it doesn't surprise me that you can't figure that out.

[pmarreck]

I am absolutely plotting the route and intervening when the car tries to do something stupid. That ends up working out a lot better than actually driving the car because you can focus on the goals, the car often knows better routes that you failed to consider, you can measure the tradeoffs and you can determine the minimum-viable-path to get there, so just fuck right the hell off with this stupid-ass baseless skepticism

the ones learning how to run the looms safely and productively are going to continue to succeed and scale upwards and outwards while you get paid pennies to use knitting needles on bespoke hand-coded solutions. And at this point, I don't give a damn anymore because you lot deserve your upcoming rot 1000%, especially with a stubborn pissant plebe fucking answer like that. Holy shit. You're literally going to stubborn yourself into poverty just to make a point. Enjoy.

[pjmlp]

Industry standards, existing team knowledge, use after free story is the same as C already has.

[bitwize]

Zig is a DOA language for other reasons though. The reason why Rust enthusiasts act so morally superior is because they are:

> Rob Pike, an unsafe guy, may insist that a small language and garbage collection are enough. But the typesafe visionary Grzegorz Wielbodłąński understands the deeper truth: every invalid state permitted by a compiler is a tiny act of civilizational sabotage.

https://x.com/typememetics/status/2078572052680790237

There is no sense pretending anymore that languages with as many gotchas as C and Zig are "simple". Quite simply, they are not. The complexities lie in what's left unspoken, unaddressed, and of course undefined; failure to comprehend these completely can be catastrophic. Rust is so thoroughly and obviously the correct thing that using anything less correct should be taken as a sign of engineering incompetence.

[K0nserv]

> There is no sense pretending anymore that languages with as many gotchas as C and Zig are "simple". Quite simply, they are not. The complexities lie in what's left unspoken, unaddressed, and of course undefined; failure to comprehend these completely can be catastrophic.

This is where I’ve arrived too. After nearly 20 years of programming I feel done with leaving foot guns lying around. Languages that are full of them, but “fine” as long as you take extreme care are not interesting to me. I’ve started calling this “simple as long as you avoid all the foot guns” idea the sword juggling fallacy[0].

It’s too bad about Zig because it has many nice ideas, in particular allocators, that I hope Rust or some future language will adopt.

0: https://hugotunius.se/2026/06/15/the-sword-juggling-fallacy....

[dnautics]

yeah rust has no footguns. just dont try to mix clone with iter.

[K0nserv]

Of course Rust has a few footguns too, that's not my point.

[skydhash]

There are many things in life that are "fine" only when you take extreme care (knives, cars, industrial machinery,...). The thing is something like C has many usages and you can't just say "use Rust" and be done with it. Using Rust is not cost-free.

[K0nserv]

I'm not saying "never use C". The thing I dislike is the false dichotomy between "(Zig|C|Go) is simple unlike Rust, which is complex". A statement like that makes it sound like writing correct code in the former is easier when it's, in fact harder.

[dnautics]

the thing is, as a pattern, footguns in zig are simple and easy to reason about (though they might be hard for an ADHD human to find). the compositional nature of rust sometimes makes footguns "hard to see" because they can be hidden behind layers of abstraction.

there is a potential future where an llm with unbounded patience would have an easy time literally walking through the zig code looking for one of the footguns might miss a footgun in rust because it's abstracted away. the ones in the stdlib should give you pause. what is hiding in some third party library's code?

[pjmlp]

There is more to it even, the UNIX and C founders arrived to Go, before retirement, after a few other interactions.

AT&T was the one doing the Cyclone research.

And then we have a bunch of folks assuming they know better about C that its own authors?

[BigTTYGothGF]

> And then we have a bunch of folks assuming they know better about C that its own authors?

Barthes aside, C's changed a lot in the years since they left.

[pjmlp]

Yes they stopped caring after C89, Plan 9 C compiler was a mix of C89 with extensions.

Still they are the authors, and withdrawing from WG14, going their own direction with Alef, Limbo, and finally Go, kind of proves the point they considered C done for its original purpose.

[BigTTYGothGF]

> kind of proves the point

I don't think it proves anything other than the wanted to work on something else.

[Ygg2]

You didn't just quote The Institute of Typesafe Memetic Research as proof of anything...

It's a shitposting, hyperbolic bait account. As funny as calling Andrew Kelley Smelley, it's not meant to be taken as gospel.

[csb6]

The post you linked to seems to jump to conclusions, to say the least. For example:

> One probable outcome of an unsafe-language-dominant world is full Andrew communism, which is precisely what Andrew “Smelley” Kelley proposes: abolish ICE and replace the market economy with a globally distributed network of community-maintained allocators.

> Rather than a commercial product, software becomes a “public good,” ultimately provided by the Zig Software Foundation as manually managed digital infrastructure.

Calling him "smelley"? Really? Pulling in the political views of the founder of a language and claiming that they inform his language design as part of a grand conspiracy against Rust/capitalism? Where are they getting all of this? Free, open-source compilers and related tooling (both of which Rust and Zig have) are already public goods managed by global communities of mostly volunteers

> This future strikes me as a dystopian hellscape, but I have never met an unsafe-language advocate who could explain how this ecosystem is supposed to sustain itself without unpaid maintainers, ideological volunteers, subsidized infrastructure, and endless donations to compiler projects that still cannot protect users from basic memory errors.

How is Rust any different than Zig in this respect? Both are projects largely run by nonprofits relying on communities to promote, maintain, and improve them.

Frankly, that entire "Institute for Type Safe Memetic Research" seems like either an elaborate satire or an account run by genuinely insane people who think type and memory safety are paramount societal issues.

[pseudony]

> run by genuinely insane people who think type and memory safety are paramount societal issues

So. Rust evangelists ? :)

But yes, it is wild that people can honestly quote such drivel as evidence of the language and its philosophy being superior.

Each time I try to evaluate Rust, I do so on its own merits. Going online I am rapidly convinced that I don’t want to be in the same room as a large chunk of its userbase. Statements start to sound a bit like that one time I was dragged into a pentecostal meeting.

[Ygg2]

If you saw the "Institute for Typesafe Memetic Research" and thought, "This is the den of Rust evangelists!" I don't want to break your illusion, because it's much funnier this way. Especially since there are like two people that like Rust on Twitter, and I'm one of them.

BTW did you hear about this:

https://babylonbee.com/news/democrats-say-they-are-perfectly...

OR

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXEddCLW3SM

[rirze]

I don't know, Andrew "Smelley" Kelly has some big beginner energy..

[Ygg2]

> Calling him "smelley"?

Turnabout is fair play.

> Frankly, that entire "Institute for Type Safe Memetic Research" seems like either an elaborate satire or an account run by genuinely insane people who think type and memory safety are paramount societal issues.

You've been had. Your entire rant means the bait worked.

[miav]

Based.

[casey2]

Bun was the flagship product of zig? In reality or in YC land

[phoghed]

If this were true the very small but active community of Zig contributors could just fork it and you could all return to the happy times of not using Bun anyway.

[CrimsonRain]

Bun became a thing because it provided some specific benefit to js ecosystem. Zig enabled the rapid development. The people who contributed were definitely helpful but they can still choose to help or not and new people will step up too

[LtWorf]

> new people will step up too

Or they will not… how could you possibly know.