I can tell you a bit about my own experience, as I've I used Rust for two years, but have now transitioned to Zig. I started working on a modular synthesis engine, and I realized that Javascript wouldn't give me the granular control I needed. So I decided to use Rust. This was my first foray into low level programming, so learning Rust first was great because I internalized their ownership rules. However, I started to realize that Rust was doing quite a bit of stuff behind my back, like freeing objects when dropped, or making allocations when I inserted an item. This is a big no-no for realtime programming, and Rust didn't help me understand what was happening. It was then that I read matklad's blog post on rust hard mode, https://matklad.github.io/2022/10/06/hard-mode-rust.html. I looked at some of his other blog posts too, and saw Zig. So Zig had been in the back of my mind for a while, when I decided to port a Tcl interpreter to Zig. I've been about 7 months in now making my own interpreter, and it's been a delightful language. Yes, I've had my share of memory leaks and double frees, but the debugging trace lets me capture a stack track at each reference count increment and decrement, so I'm able to hunt them down pretty well. I'm also hyper aware of memory layout and allocation failure, because allocation is fallible in Zig. The error union handling makes it pretty easy to propagate OOM though, so it's not hard to make code that's resilient to OOM. If I had tried to make this in Rust, I would have been fighting the standard library, ecosystem, and borrow checker constantly, because high level programming languages have non-trivial ownership semantics, and a lot of optimizations like epoch based variable caching just don't play nicely with references as trees.

> and should not try zig?

Because it isn't memory safe. I honestly think it's beyond the point of "irresponsible" and well into "negligence" that we're still developing unsafe technologies - people are being harmed by this choice. It's one thing when you have to target specific platforms and maybe Rust wasn't an option or whatever, but the reasons to choose unsafe languages at this point are vanishingly small.

Zig is very cool, I love many aspects of it. I'll never touch it, I'll always advocate against it tbh. I'd probably advocate that software written in languages like Zig be flagged for FEDRAMP and other environments since devs seem to not care unless they're legally barred from making these sorts of choices.

I don't think Rust users are relevant here. It primarily comes down to personal preferences, and since Zig and Rust are so different, some will be drawn to Rust and others to Zig. If you really like a language and it suits your needs, be it Rust or any other, there's no need to look to switch. I think that the audience Zig is aimed at is low-level programmers who haven't taken a liking to Rust, which is the majority of them. Rust isn't very popular among experienced low-level programmers (certainly for a language that old), and I guess Zig is hoping to be more to their liking.

For example, I find Rust to be far too similar to C++, and it shares most of the problems I have with C++ only with much lower adoption. I'm not saying I'm ready to make the switch, but at least Zig offers a different approach that's intriguing to me.

Try it if you want full control over every memory and IO operation and "drop". If you hit "goto-definition", you eventually get to see the OS switch statements and syscalls. There's not much magic.

Do not try it if you are scared of memory management and memory leaks.

Not working within the bounds of lifetimes, and more ecosystem that doesn't live in the world of lifetimes, gives Zig some of the wonderful dev ergonomics of Rust while making it easier to prototype.

For small, short game dev, or even smaller embedded projects, this ends up being a wonderful way to live as often times you're trying to eke out performance in ways that would require breaking out of whatever type abstractions or using unsafe.

For long-lived systems, for systems that need to have lots of people with various skill levels work on them, for a mature ecosystem, for a language/standard library with stability... You probably don't want to pick Zig right now. Some of these points will change over time with Zig becoming more mature, some won't. Zig will always be super cool to build things in.

As far as most low-level programmers not liking Rust like some other commenters say, lol, lmao even.