For anyone excited about this project: The repo does not contain a compiler yet. It's just an intention to build one.
The interesting thing here is really the reaction from the HN community, not the incomplete implementation.
Having said that, this is a brilliant project.
Eventually it pans out and gets replaced by something else.
I would also add that rewriting something that exists in a new language is both a brilliant way to learn that language but also, if the language is still evolving, feed back improvements to the language itself.
What did I miss this time? Would you please elaborate?!
I think it will be successful despite that, because we've seen this happen before in other ecosystems... e.g. Scala was a large step away from Java, while Kotlin is a much smaller one, and in a way, you could also describe it as a step back from Scala. Yet, despite being younger, Kotlin has already surpassed Scala according to some rankings and has some major projects already (maybe more than Scala) investing heavily on it, like Android and Gradle.
Perhaps, another example is Elm... much simpler than Haskell or PureScript, but it seems to be by far the most popular functional language on the frontend.
Finally, I've written some Zig and definitely didn't feel like I have to debug a lot of segfaults... the tools to avoid that problem are already pretty good (the debug memory allocator is almost as strict as the Rust borrow checker and will keep you on check!) and even having little experience manually managing memory, I was able to get stuff done quite easily (unlike with C which I do find extremely dangerous on my own hands).
I guess in the end should be happier that more Zig and less C gets written.
It isn't there yet, but wait for 40 years industry adoption will make to it.
Now, I'd say they're on the same order of magnitude for simplicity. The huge advantage Rust has is that it tells you when you got it wrong, whereas C++ says "OK, I will put the toast in the fridge."
While Rust is definitely an improvement over C++, it remains to be seen how those 40 years of legacy will look like.
The people behind Jai and Odin have both expressed the opinion that the problems Rust prevents are not important. I would tend the pigeonhole this as "Real programmer" macho bullshit, especially from Jonathan, but I could be wrong of course.