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Comment by sgt | Hacker News Reader

Zig is really HN's new love story, isn't it. Or quickly becoming...

Rust is still popular but it turns out the developer joy is pretty low.

I’ve been dabbling in OS development. I started with rust and it was… ok. Lots of what you’d expect: unsafe all over the place, weird borrow checker work arounds. It felt like I was bending the languages arm.

I recently started to re implement the (admittedly very basic) kernel in Zig and it’s been a breath of fresh air. The language seems much better suited for the level of abstraction that Osdev lives at. Major bonus is that all the existing C code is directly useable in a zig project without any wrapper nonsense or it can be easily translated.

I think I’ll stick with dig for a bit.

I think base Rust is a great language, but the ecosystem tends towards very complex and overengineered solutions; with advanced uses/abuses of macros and the type system, trait hell ends up being not too dissimilar to template hell from C++. And the async/await story is plagued with layers and layers of complexity due to the many obtuse interactions with its lifetime system. Rust honestly probably should've gone with its original idea of green threads/channels, like GC-less Go, but that idea was dropped a long time ago.

"Joy" is always highest for new languages, because there are only green fields and enthusiasts. "Joy" is also increased by languages that let you just do what you want, like dynamic typing, or other language features that delay seeing that first error.

This is a good point. Zig is practically optimized for this: comptime is extremely dynamically typed compared to actual generics, and the lack of memory safety is often "a breath of fresh air"--until you have to actually fix bugs (including security bugs) resulting from it.

It's like the "joy" of a good vacation paid for with a credit card.

I appreciate Zig and hope it succeeds. I don't dismiss the benefits of Rust like some comments though; the borrow checker or unsafe syntax may be a pain now, but so is saving money before a vacation.

> Rust is still popular but it turns out the developer joy is pretty low.

Rust is one of the language I enjoy to use. The problem is you need to overcome its steep learning curve in order to enjoy it, which people tend to give up because it is too hard.

For me, it wasn’t the learning curve that was the problem with Rust. It’s the compilation time. It’s just so slow. I’m used to OCaml, Go, and Typescript (via Bun or esbuild) with iteration times in the tens-to-low-hundreds of milliseconds. Zig still feels a wee bit slow, but it’s acceptable. Rust? It makes me want to toss my laptop into the fire.

To be honest, I haven’t touched Rust in years, so it may have improved.

Coming from those, I can see how it'd be a downgrade. Coming from C++ it's like greased lightning.

It has improved continually over the years, but on the order of 3x-5x, and by the way you talk about it, you’re looking for 10x-100x, so I doubt it’s not still an issue for you.

Which to me is fine. It's not a great hobby language but it is a fantastic professional language, precisely because of the ease of refactors and speed of development that comes with the type system and borrow checker.

> It's not a great hobby language but it is a fantastic professional language,

I never thought I'd live to see the day when someone would say this. The first 5 years of Rust were all "this is interesting for hobby projects but nobody will ever adopt this in industry".

If you’re only looking at HN, sure.

The programming world is much larger than this small slice of the internet, though. HN has had several eras of “this is the hot new fad language and you should use it!”, going as far back as Lisp in the mid-2000s.

It will likely continue to experience this cycle until the heat death of the universe.

> Rust is still popular but it turns out the developer joy is pretty low.

I mean, Rust keeps winning the "most loved" language contest on GitHub, so it seems someone likes it.

I think you're talking about stackoverflow not github

Yeah, sorry, my mistake. GitHub did report on the SO survey [1], which probably led to my mixup.

Anyway, Rust was still the "most admired" language in 2024 [2].

[1]: https://github.blog/developer-skills/programming-languages-a...

[2]: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology#admired-and-...

https://github.blog/news-insights/octoverse/octoverse-2024/#...

What are you talking about?

https://github.blog/developer-skills/programming-languages-a...

Your link is from 2023 and references 2022. (It is also much more of an advertisement for Rust than anything else.)

The one I shared before that is from late 2024. What are you trying to say other than Rust has peaked?

I'm happy to revise what I said from "Rust keeps winning" to "Rust continually won" if you want to nitpick my choice of verb tenses. It refutes the idea that the "developer joy is pretty low" either way.

> It refutes the idea that the "developer joy is pretty low" either way.

https://deadmoney.gg/news/articles/migrating-away-from-rust

https://loglog.games/blog/leaving-rust-gamedev

https://www.boringcactus.com/2025/04/13/2025-survey-of-rust-...

https://gist.github.com/rtfeldman/77fb430ee57b42f5f2ca973a39...

https://medium.com/@rusty-vibes/part-4-abandoning-rust-for-c...

A pile of evidence refutes your statement. There is more if you need.

> I'm happy to revise what I said from "Rust keeps winning" to "Rust continually won"

"Rust has peaked"

Yes, you have correctly pointed out that there are some developers who are unhappy with Rust.

I don't really care to have an argument as to whether "Rust has peaked" or not. Rust is the same language now as it was in 2023, and 2022, and 2021, etc., and developers liked it then. That's all.

> A pile of evidence refutes your statement. There is more if you need.

There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses

Of course some people are going to complain about Rust (for many various reasons, and had you read the links you posted, you'd have noticed that they all moved to a different one: C++, Zig or C#), the question is which share of it do, and the answer is a smaller one than in other mainstream languages.

> "Rust has peaked"

You wish.

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