The original Zig code is metaphorically one big unsafe block. Even if the Rust port is made up of 3% unsafe blocks, that still means 97% of the original Zig code has been made safe (in the Rust sense).
Surely it's obvious that's trivially untrue?
Also, literally no code is safe from potential future upstream changes.
Anyway, I'm not arguing zig has the same safety guarantees as rust. That would be silly. But the weird binary thinking around memory safety is equally silly. People want things to be simple, but you really can't come to good conclusions by trying to pretend things are simpler than they are and through a lack of analysis and thinking.
An LLM could probably also trivially give you accurate reviews saying which parts were unsafe and in need of tests or reviews. I mean, considering their LLM budgets they could probably have had nightly reviews running every night for years before spending more than their Rust rewrite.
Not that I think Rust rewrite was a bad idea. Rust is a good fit for this kind of project. I say that as a Zig enthusiast. It’s just that their stated motivation and reported results are kinda BS. If they just wrote “we just like Rust and thought it’d be cool to see of LLM could do the whole rewrite”, and left it at that, I think it’d be a more honest description of the motivation. The rest is just rationalisation.
Do you know what's infinitely cheaper and faster than an LLM running nightly reviews of all of the code and infact mathematically provable that the code (and any new code) is memory safe? It's called the borrow checker.
(my wip experiment: ) https://github.com/ityonemo/clr