I don't think that's the parallel I would draw.
Rather, I think both Zig and Rust aim to serve the use cases C and C++ do, but Zig and Rust pick different points on the tradeoffs involving safety. Zig feels like a "better C", in the sense of bringing modern language features to C, but it chooses safer rather than safe. Rust supplies modern language features as well, and chooses to prioritize safe; sometimes that comes at the expense of other factors, such as productivity or compile time. I personally prefer the point on the spectrum that Rust chose, but I think Zig still offers improvements over C.
One thing that impressed me about Zig is how simple the language is. I get the impression that it would take very little time to properly learn the language and become effective at it.
Rust, on the other hand, has a whole lot of complexity even without the ownership semantics. So much to learn and understand. And, in some cases, work around. It seems, from looking at others' code, that there is a very strong temptation to lean on `unsafe` instead of figuring out how to solve a problem within the constraints it normally applies.
That has me wondering if there's really all that much safety difference in practice? Simpler code is generally easier to understand, and it's generally easier to find and fix bugs in code that's easier to understand. I can imagine a world where it's a tradeoff between, "You definitely won't have any of this relatively narrow category of bug, unless of course you opt out of the static checks, which you will probably do sometimes, even though we tell you you shouldn't," and, "There are no particular guarantees, but you're generally less likely to have any of this broader category of bug."
Some people do believe that, let's say "conceptually parsimonious" languages (using complicated words to describe simplicity is amusing to me, sorry) do exactly what you say. Others believe that complexity inherently exists, and you can put it in the language, where a compiler can tirelessly check certain properties for you or a runtime can do magical complicated work on your behalf, or you can put it in the programs, where users have to check such things themselves.
Another way I heard this expressed one time is Ruby vs Python. I once heard someone talk about how they preferred Python as a language more, because it was simpler, but enjoyed actually programming in Ruby more, even thought it was more complex, and they value simplicity. The reason is that all of that nasty ugly stuff Ruby lets you do makes you be able to make extremely nice APIs. Things you couldn't do, or just folks don't do, in Python. And therefore they ended up liking using Ruby more in practice.
I suspect that this is a topic that we, as a profession, will debate about endlessly.
I think we'd all agree there's a spectrum, with, say, Assembly on one end and Idris on the other, where neither Zig nor Rust are near either extreme, and are actually rather close to each other. It's not a matter of accepting or rejecting a principle, but on picking slightly different sweet spots (hopefully) on a tradeoff spectrum.
Rust doesn't check at compile-time most things that could be checked at compile-time. In fact both language check almost the same things at compile-time, and almost the same things at runtime. The design differences come down to one or two things that are clearly tricky and that neither language "does for you" -- i.e. you still need to think about them -- but are, indeed, checked in different ways.
I personally would not agree with
> Languages with more powerful abstraction abilities bring joy to the writer but make things tedious for the reader.
I find map/filter to be easier to read than a C-style for loop. Things that are conceptually denser make discussion between experts easier, even if it makes things harder for non-experts. This is why jargon exists, for example.
In short I believe languages that one can pick up in a couple of days and then read code where reasoning of the code is highly local would stand a higher chance of being perceived as simple.
Programmers notoriously conflate "simple" and "easy" (classic talk: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy/) and so I believe languages that are easy for a lot of programmers will also be perceived as simple, whether or not that's accurate.
char* c_foo(char* bar) { ... }
fn rust_foo<'a>(bar: &'a str) -> &'a str { ... }
On the one hand, c_foo is shorter and doesn't use strange symbols. On the other hand, rust_foo doesn't leave you guessing on whether the returned value needs to be free()d or not, and whether the heap allocation backing `bar` can be free()d after the call or not.
fn rust_foo(a: &str) -> &str { ... }
Are you sure those examples of unsafe Rust code were written using unsafe in order to work around safety constraints due to difficulty?
I ask because there are some very real and valid use cases for unsafe code in Rust that have nothing to do with the fact that writing the code safely might be more difficult.
The big bias I'm working from here is that, as an outsider, I have a hard time reconciling all the big talk about how Rust makes it impossible to experience certain classes of bugs, with the existence of a known set of things that its type checker can't check, and which includes a lot of things that are difficult to avoid. One could be forgiven for thinking that the Rust community has a habit of keeping its fingers crossed behind its back when talking.
I don't want to make the perfect the enemy of the good, of course. I realize the feature is there for an important reason. But it sure looks to me like Zig is also good despite being imperfect. Perhaps they're both similarly good languages.
https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch19-01-unsafe-rust.html
The spec here is to turn one mutable slice into two non-overlapping mutable slices. The operation does not violate memory safety; we wind up with only one mutable reference to any part of the object. But the compiler does not know how to verify that the programmer has done this correctly. Here, 'unsafe' means 'I certify that this is safe, use that as a lemma to do further checking'.
It is a big difference to have it on your face that something might need to be properly double checked and having each line of code as possible security exploit.
Would you consider Oberon to belong in the former or latter category? On one hand, there's no explicit code blocks as such (syntactically). On the other hand, unsafe primitive operations are limited to the SYSTEM module, so functions calling operations in the SYSTEM module can be considered doing unsafe things.
Just like Modula-2 already does it.
And just like languages with unsafe code blocks, there are compilers that have switches to forbid the use of tainted modules unless explicitly allowed.
In any case, way better than what C, C++ and Objective-C offer, regarding security per line of code.
It's far worse than that, the problem is that the machine can't know what was intended. The result 5 from calling sum([1,2,1,1]) makes sense, but alas this function was intended to produce the product not the sum, the inputs were supposed to be [1,2,3,4] and the desired result was 24... the machine can't hope to guess that.
A program may be buggy even if it its meaning is transparent and exactly reflects its effect, simply because it doesn't reflect the intention of the person who wrote the wrong program.
This quote is attributed to Babbage:
'On two occasions I have been asked, – "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" ... I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question'
But that is what we wanted, even if we obviously can't have it.
The biggest difference in the problems they solve, in my view, is that Zig does not aim for safety. It'll be easier to write safe programs yourself with Zig than it might be with C, but it doesn't give you any guarantees.
Zig also seems like it may be a better fit for embedded programming; there's a big community around embedded Rust, and it sounds like there's a lot of progress, but still an uphill battle.
But yes, Zig:Rust :: C:C++ has merit in that Zig is a much smaller, less feature-rich language.
The issue with this analogy is that it assumes that C, one of the languages used in the most diverse set of circumstances ever, means the same thing to everyone. Same with C++, frankly.
There's definitely something to that analogy, but I think it also misses a lot of really important details. For example, Zig has generics, which right off the bat makes it hard to say that it's "like C". Also Rust enforces memory safety, which isn't like C or C++.
Of couse, it's a much less powerful feature, there's nothing like interfaces or stuff, just a way to "overload" based on the type.
The only preprocessor part in the example is mapping the function-like macro 'cbrt(X)' to the language keyword '_Generic(X)'.
I wrote a blog post about comptime if you want to learn more: https://kristoff.it/blog/what-is-zig-comptime/
I feel like Rust wants to replace C but it also wants to replace C++. And given the complexity difference between the two languages, that means that Rust will end up closer to C++ than to C.
So there's some overlap based on how Rust positions itself, but not based on how Zig positions itself.
Rust wants to make systems programming memory safe (and type safe while at it). It's not really about any specific language, it's about dragging the field forwards on the safety front.
Well it's not really Rust, it's the Rust community, which kinda wrestled it away from Graydon Hoare: the original inception of Rust was more of an applications language (what with the evented model and the split stack and the planned-though-never-really-implemented GC'd pointers) — which explains part of the historical confusion with / comparison to Go.
But then a critical mass of people took a look at this early rust and figured "we've got plenty of memory-safe and type-safe (ish) languages for applications, but this thing has precise control over memory and lifetimes and shit, we could actually build reliable infrastructure with that", and it coincided with a lot of memory safety issues news (which has been continuing ever since), and the rest is history, pretty much.
> Zig is a general-purpose programming language and toolchain for maintaining robust, optimal, and reusable software.
Keep up the good work, I'm excited to see where Zig goes next.
I'm imaging some poor software engineer in 2065, having to maintain an enterprise legacy stack... levels of FORTRAN/COBOL->C->C++->ZIG->RUST->PERL->PYTHON.... all the way up....JS..etc..
Of course, the complexity might explode from there…or you might just not really notice it all that often. Anybody familiar with LLVM or WASM or heck even a language that can transpile to JavaScript can probably relate to this possibility.
The thing that’s harder to fathom is going from low-level to high-level. High-level -> intermediary low-level -> high-level is fathomable though.
I do, because that would mean that more attention must be paid to make languages work together, instead of each language ecosystem becoming its own little island. Maintaining a project built from a dozen languages (where each language does one thing well) should be just as simple as maintaining a mono-language project.
I have good news and bad news: That programmer will not know any of those languages, as they will just program in English and GPT-3000 will convert it into code.
GPT-3000 will have no problem understanding some interpretation of your English (or Spanish or Mandarin) "program", but will it be the right one? How long will it take to get GPT-3000 to understand what you mean when you can only talk to it in English (or Spanish or Mandarin) ?
A piece of software is a set of instructions that tell a computer how to do something. We use languages like C, Python, Haskell and Lisp to describe what to do in ways that avoid as much ambiguity as possible.
The question is: if you used a natural (human) language, how much confusion would (a) the putative GPT-3000 (b) another programmer (c) a compiler/interpreter incur when trying to understand your instructions?
The ZIG compiler requires a C compiler to compile to a native executable though.
Do you mean compiling the zig compiler or zig programs?
I think neither is quite the case. zig itself can build both Zig programs and C/C++ ones. Zig doesn't need to use a C compiler to build native Zig executables. It does need a linker, as does Rust, as do C/C++ programs and AFAIK zld is not yet ready.
However it's accurate to say that it's only able to compile the C/C++ code by leveraging libclang, the C/C++ compiler underneath.
By the way, check out this project by Zig core team member, Vexu: https://github.com/Vexu/arocc
No it doesn't? Not unless you want to also compile C, which the Zig compiler is capable of doing because it bundles clang.