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Comment by xedrac | Hacker News Reader

I like Zig as a replacement for C, but not C++ due to its lack of RAII. Rust on the other hand is a great replacement for C++. I see Zig as filling a small niche where allocation failures are paramount - very constrained embedded devices, etc... Otherwise, I think you just get a lot more with Rust.

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Compile times and painful to refactor codebase are rust’s main drawbacks for me though.

It’s totally subjective but I find the language boring to use. For side projects I like having fun thus I picked zig.

To each his own of course.

> refactor codebase are rust’s main drawbacks

Hard disagree about refactoring. Rust is one of the few languages where you can actually do refactoring rather safely without having tons of tests that just exist to catch issues if code changes.

Lifetimes and generic tend to leak so you have to modify your code all around the place when you touch them though.

Explicit lifetimes are not super common, and I haven't had any trouble with them causing refactor headaches. Generics obviously do leak, the same way that C++ templates do.

Even better than RAII would be linear types, but it would require a borrow checker to track the lifetimes of objects. Then you would get a compiler error if you forget to call a .destroy() method

no you just need analysis with a dependent type system (which linear types are a subset of). it doesn't have to be in the compiler. there was a proof of concept here a few months ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42923829

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43199265

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