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Comment by ucirello | Hacker News Reader

Why not Zig?

Why not Rust? Zig does not have nearly the same memory guarantees as Rust, I mean, why create a new language and still make the same fundamental errors when we've fixed them in other languages. That's also how I feel about Go and its lack of algebraic data types.

Zig is a completely different language than Rust. Memory safety is just one aspect. I personally find Rust to be very difficult to read and can never manage to be productive in it.

Lacking memory safety is a fundamental mistake in my opinion, not merely one aspect. We have learned much from the days of C and C++, so much that companies are migrating away and finding that many of their bugs are solved with memory safe languages like Rust.

I forgot to follow up on this, I don't know how to make HN give me some kind of a notification on replies to my comments.

I should have been a bit more clear. I love memory safety. But I dislike a lot of other aspects specific to Rust. I would much prefer e.g. C with memory safety (somehow). So that is, for me, why not Rust. Rust is more more than just memory safety.

https://www.hnreplies.com is an unofficial way to get comment replies via email.

Perhaps you should look into Vale or Pony then, they have memory safety like Rust, also without a GC, but they use different mechanisms for it.

> I don't know how to make HN give me some kind of a notification on replies to my comments

I built https://hackernewsalerts.com for that

Zig doesn't have a 1.0 release yet so I'd be hesitant to use it on any production projects. I've dabbled in it for some toy projects just to get a feel for the language and so far I think I still prefer Rust although the simplicity of Zig is something I can get behind.

What does Zig offer over Rust in this use case? It makes lower-level operations easier, but that's not super relevant to most UI work (unless you're Figma)

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