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Comment by jadbox | Hacker News Reader

Fwiw, Zig is one of the few languages on my radar that's on the uptick. At least in my circle, I know people from firmware to VM development that moved from Rust over to Zig for its flexibility. There' also Bun that managed to nearly be a drop-in replacement for Node in a very short development cycle, which they claim is due to Zig. (I am not associated with Zig nor have a lot of experience with it yet)

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I've heard great things about Zig as well. The one difference between it and Rust is the amount of industry and financial investment to date. Rust has had literally millions of dollars of buy-in from some of the biggest tech corporations on Earth, which is why I'm more confident that it will likely stick around.

This is one area where, for example, Julia has struggled. In many ways it's a fantastic language for scientific research, but it simply has never received nearly as much funding or investment as, e.g., Python.

At 8 years (1999) python did not have any big investment or even big tech backers. IIRC the first real python success story was dropbox

At 8 years there's a major JavaScript bundler and Uber using zig.

As someone who starting using Rust from before it reached 1.0, it's insanely funny to me to see comments like this.

People said the exact same kind of thing about Rust at the time!

I also appreciate the way that Zig focuses on tooling, particularly around cross-compilation. That's something that is usually a "nice to have" rather than "must have" particularly in young projects, and for users that need it, it's a huge win.

Also Zig wants to have better memory safety before v1 - there's an issue tracking that in the zig org but I couldn't find it

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