I have spent some time with Rust and written some non-trivial Zig code (a simpler assembler). My simple take-away is that Rust is simply too complicated.

I spend some time on other technologies on occasion. I could get into Zig fairly quickly and do some useful stuff with it.

With Rust it felt like I had to really decide on some significant time investment to be able to get anything done. It really reminds me a lot of Haskell. Those kinds of pure, elegant languages which are awesome once you grok them, but which is never really going to be used apart from in a small niche because they are too hard to learn from an average developer with limited time on his hands.

Rust and Haskell is more like the languages I looked for when I was younger. When I had these utopian visions of THE best programming language. I have long lost any belief in that. I do think strong type systems are helpful, but I also think they tend to get overhyped and overrated.

I am with Rob Pike, one of the Go designers on this. Writing correct code is a lot about understanding and being able to reason about that code. A simpler language makes it easier to reason about code and understand it. That makes it more likely that you make the code correct or is able to maintain and fix it.

I do believe this complexity barrier begins at different places for different people. But for me I think Rust is too complex. Knowing myself I would get back to 3-4 weeks old code and wonder what the hell I wrote.

If you get into that situation you are likely to make mistakes. This is what I believe developers often forget when chasing down the BEST tool. That ultimately it is your brain that is supposed to solve problems not the tool. If a tool solves some problems but reduce your brains ability to do its job, then the tool isn't really an aid.

To be honest I am not actually certain if Zig has hit the sweat spot either. Go is quite good. You can pick up quite old Go code and still read it with relative ease.

Zig is definitely not as easy as Go to read. I feel like I have to wait until a 1.0 release before passing judgment. Some of the issues I felt I had with Zig is down to lack of documentation and rough edges in the standard library.