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I quite honestly wonder sometimes why Rust excited me so much when I first started using it, but I do not get such excitement from Zig. Nowadays it's very easy

I quite honestly wonder sometimes why Rust excited me so much when I first started using it, but I do not get such excitement from Zig. Nowadays it's very easy to be excited about Rust because it demonstrated that ownership works but when I started using it, there was still garbage collection etc. Zig looks really cool but it feels like it has a high chance of being a niche language. Rust never felt like that.

jventura 6y ago
Maybe it's because Rust is backed by Mozilla, which is a bigger player than Zig's creator?
- the_mitsuhiko 6y ago
  That if anything would have made me more suspicious. Mozilla had and still has an awful track record of keeping projects alive.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- ChrisSD 6y ago
  Rust is currently backed more by Amazon and Microsoft than it is by Mozilla. The main contribution of Mozilla is to hold the trademark on behalf of the Rust project.
weinzierl 6y ago
While Zig is an awesome project I feel a little bit the same. My two cents are that it is because Zig, as innovative as it is, has nothing that other languages couldn't copy or assimilate. With Rust it is a different story, because the ownership model cannot be plugged into other languages without changing them fundamentally. My prediction is similar to yours that Zig will be an important research project but not go mainstream. A counterargument is of course that Zig's closeness to C will make it win in conservative industries and it wouldn't be the first time a more incremental approach wins over the more innovative one. Also I have to stress that I only have a cursory knowledge of Zig so far. I hope I didn't do the language injustice and I'd like to hear other opinions about this.
- kasperni 6y ago
  > has nothing that other languages couldn't copy or assimilate. You cannot "copy" simplicity into a complex language. (Not trying to start a discussions about whether or not Rust is complicated.)
  - the_mitsuhiko 6y ago
    Agreed. One thing though is if a language is simple because it's early or if simplicity is a core value to the language development. A lot of "simple" languages just become complex over time as they get more users and feature requests.
- flohofwoe 6y ago
  Rust and Zig target different audiences though. It's often been said before, but Rust is mainly a C++ replacement, while Zig is mainly a C replacement. I have switched from C++ as my default-language to C a few years ago, and having dabbled a bit in both, I feel a lot more attracted to Zig than Rust for future projects (and mostly for the same reasons why I switched from C++ to C). If Zig can settle in the niche that C is used for today (including "nearby" areas where C programmers consider switching to a higher-level language), then it is already a great success. I think (rather: hope) what we will see in the future is that no single language will dominate certain fields anymore like it was the case in the 90's and early 00's. Rust doesn't need to fit into every niche, and it would be harmful to bend Rust in a way that it fits everywhere. It would end up as a "kitchen-sink language" with tons of competing concepts and ideas. This is exactly what's currently killing C++.
  - twic 6y ago
    > If Zig can settle in the niche that C is used for today That niche is "code that needs to be portable to any system with a C compiler", or "... to a particular system that only has a C compiler" so i am not sure it can. There are lots of projects using C that aren't in that niche, but i don't believe there is a good reason for any of them to be using C over C++ these days. It's either history, inertia, or Luddism.
lifthrasiir 6y ago
It might be the timing that matters. The very needs for safe and friendly system programming arose---or rather became clear---around 2010, when both Rust (0.1) and Go appeared. Having appeared 5 years later, Zig can be seen as a follower (a very great one, of course) and may no longer give much excitement as Rust did.
j-krieger 6y ago
For me personally, Rust was a challenge. Most programming languages are more or less the same. But Rust forced me to think in a way I've never encountered before. I guess this is also why many people like it.
- creata 6y ago
  For me, I wouldn't say it's just because it was a challenge. The ideas that Rust makes explicit — borrowing, tracking lifetimes, mutable vs. immutable references — they're lessons that carry over into other languages very well.
gmueckl 6y ago
Never underestimate the importance of aggressive marketing and sales around tools for software developers. Even OSS projects need clever sales pitches and visibility to become successful. Mozilla had the resources to pull that off for Rust.
layoutIfNeeded 6y ago
In my experience software developers getting excited about their tools rarely lead to good outcomes for the projects they're working on.
- snovv_crash 6y ago
  Same. Make the tools boring so the excitement can go into the product.
kazagistar 6y ago
For me its easy: haskell was cool for more obvious reasons but a bit much, and rust felt like an interesting yet practical very strongly typed language.
jahaja 6y ago
I think it's much about preference, some like simpler languages, some like more expressive ones. I for one have a really hard time liking expressive ones, hence Go & Zig is my small but high-quality toolbox rather than a larger toolbox. I just can't get that excited about the language itself beyond a certain point, I just want simple, predictable high-quality tools to help me produce simple, high-quality code and applications. Anyway, all of the above is ofc subjective.
pron 6y ago
My impression was completely the opposite. I was very excited about Rust at first, especially the ownership system, but after a while I saw that it was a cleaned-up C++ with most of C++'s problems (one of the most complex programming languages in software history; very slow feedback loop). Zig, on the other hand, seems revolutionary and a complete rethinking, from the ground-up, of what low-level programming should be. True, Rust is probably 100x more popular, but is still well below 1% market adoption, so we're comparing two rounding errors in terms of adoption.
- the_mitsuhiko 6y ago
  Rust is trying to replace C++. If you were not in the market for C++ to begin with it's unlikely that Rust is going to excite you.
  - pron 6y ago
    That's one way of looking at it, but that I'm shopping for a C++ replacement doesn't mean I'll necessarily like another C++-like language. C++ is my primary language, and if I replace it -- given that switching a new language is very costly no matter which new language I pick -- I might as well wait for a more revolutionary replacement, that fixes all/most problems I have with it, rather than just a few. I don't know if Zig is that thing just yet, but it looks more promising -- to me, given my particular taste -- than Rust. But, TBF, I was very excited about Rust at first, so my excitement for Zig might wane as well.
  - mlindner 6y ago
    Rust is not "trying" to replace anything. Rust can and is used plenty for embedded programming where only C was ever used previously. People have commented they prefer writing simple command line applications in it more than they do python.
- Rusky 6y ago
  I really don't see how Rust has most of C++'s problems. Slow compiler, sure, though things are changing. Most complex languages in history? Only if you squint at it from 10000 feet and ignore what the complexity is doing. C++ has approximately eighteen different partially-overlapping categories of variable initialization, many of which are legacy-but-still-used! [0] And some of those categories have changed their boundaries every language version since C++11 (based on the definition of "aggregate"). C++ has three to five partially-overlapping kinds of type inference all in active use (auto, decltype(id), decltype((expr)), decltype(auto), template argument deduction)! This is interleaved with name lookup and overload resolution (below), so if some subexpression isn't compiling how you expect, you have a vast space of language features potentially to blame. C++ has so many kinds of name lookup and namespacing that I'm not even sure how to count them. There's unqualified lookup, argument-dependent lookup, qualified lookup, class member access, etc. Sometimes you can't refer to things defined later (outside a class) and sometimes you can (inside a class). There is even undefined behavior if you mess up namespacing! (Undiagnosed ODR violations are every experienced C++ programmer's nightmare.) C++ has ad-hoc overload resolution based on un-scoped identifiers, which even crosses namespace boundaries using one of the above name lookup modes. It has two kinds of user-defined implicit conversions ("explicit" and implicit) that also affect this selection process, on top of the zoo of "type promotions" inherited from C. C++ classes have five to six kinds of "special member functions," some of which may be defined automatically by the compiler, each with its own rules for when and how, based on what else is defined in the class. These also contribute to overload resolution, of course. [0]: https://blog.tartanllama.xyz/initialization-is-bonkers/ https://blog.tartanllama.xyz/initialization-is-bonkers/ Rust has a complexity of its own, but it's quite different in scale and quality. There is exactly one way to initialize a variable, exactly one kind of type inference, only two ways for names to be resolved (directly or via an imported trait). Overloading, implicit conversions (of which there is only one kind, Deref), and the replacement for "special member functions" (Copy, Clone, Drop) are all based on exactly one mechanism (again, traits). The article has a pretty accurate description of how people experience Rust's remaining C++-like complexity, IMO: "I don't remember the order in which methods are resolved during autoderefencing, or how module visibility works, or how the type system determines if one impl might overlap another or be an orphan." But one important aspect it leaves out (not being a C++ article) is that if you mess up any of these, you just get a compiler error- and Rust is well-known for having extremely helpful error messages. In C++ you may get a compiler error (known for being extremely unhelpful) or you may get undefined behavior. Zig is certainly a smaller language than either C++ or Rust, but that comes at a cost. I would much rather hear discussion of those actual trade-offs than yet another "Rust is just as complicated as C++" non-claim.
gridlockd 6y ago
> I quite honestly wonder sometimes why Rust excited me so much when I first started using it, but I do not get such excitement from Zig. Good! Maybe you can actually get something done using it then, instead of getting lost in mastering lots of concepts just for the sake of it.

jventura 6y ago

Maybe it's because Rust is backed by Mozilla, which is a bigger player than Zig's creator?

the_mitsuhiko 6y ago
That if anything would have made me more suspicious. Mozilla had and still has an awful track record of keeping projects alive.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ChrisSD 6y ago
Rust is currently backed more by Amazon and Microsoft than it is by Mozilla. The main contribution of Mozilla is to hold the trademark on behalf of the Rust project.

weinzierl 6y ago

While Zig is an awesome project I feel a little bit the same. My two cents are that it is because Zig, as innovative as it is, has nothing that other languages couldn't copy or assimilate. With Rust it is a different story, because the ownership model cannot be plugged into other languages without changing them fundamentally. My prediction is similar to yours that Zig will be an important research project but not go mainstream. A counterargument is of course that Zig's closeness to C will make it win in conservative industries and it wouldn't be the first time a more incremental approach wins over the more innovative one. Also I have to stress that I only have a cursory knowledge of Zig so far. I hope I didn't do the language injustice and I'd like to hear other opinions about this.

kasperni 6y ago
> has nothing that other languages couldn't copy or assimilate. You cannot "copy" simplicity into a complex language. (Not trying to start a discussions about whether or not Rust is complicated.)
- the_mitsuhiko 6y ago
  Agreed. One thing though is if a language is simple because it's early or if simplicity is a core value to the language development. A lot of "simple" languages just become complex over time as they get more users and feature requests.
flohofwoe 6y ago
Rust and Zig target different audiences though. It's often been said before, but Rust is mainly a C++ replacement, while Zig is mainly a C replacement. I have switched from C++ as my default-language to C a few years ago, and having dabbled a bit in both, I feel a lot more attracted to Zig than Rust for future projects (and mostly for the same reasons why I switched from C++ to C). If Zig can settle in the niche that C is used for today (including "nearby" areas where C programmers consider switching to a higher-level language), then it is already a great success. I think (rather: hope) what we will see in the future is that no single language will dominate certain fields anymore like it was the case in the 90's and early 00's. Rust doesn't need to fit into every niche, and it would be harmful to bend Rust in a way that it fits everywhere. It would end up as a "kitchen-sink language" with tons of competing concepts and ideas. This is exactly what's currently killing C++.
- twic 6y ago
  > If Zig can settle in the niche that C is used for today That niche is "code that needs to be portable to any system with a C compiler", or "... to a particular system that only has a C compiler" so i am not sure it can. There are lots of projects using C that aren't in that niche, but i don't believe there is a good reason for any of them to be using C over C++ these days. It's either history, inertia, or Luddism.

lifthrasiir 6y ago

It might be the timing that matters. The very needs for safe and friendly system programming arose---or rather became clear---around 2010, when both Rust (0.1) and Go appeared. Having appeared 5 years later, Zig can be seen as a follower (a very great one, of course) and may no longer give much excitement as Rust did.

j-krieger 6y ago

For me personally, Rust was a challenge. Most programming languages are more or less the same. But Rust forced me to think in a way I've never encountered before. I guess this is also why many people like it.

creata 6y ago
For me, I wouldn't say it's just because it was a challenge. The ideas that Rust makes explicit — borrowing, tracking lifetimes, mutable vs. immutable references — they're lessons that carry over into other languages very well.

gmueckl 6y ago

Never underestimate the importance of aggressive marketing and sales around tools for software developers. Even OSS projects need clever sales pitches and visibility to become successful. Mozilla had the resources to pull that off for Rust.

layoutIfNeeded 6y ago

In my experience software developers getting excited about their tools rarely lead to good outcomes for the projects they're working on.

snovv_crash 6y ago
Same. Make the tools boring so the excitement can go into the product.

kazagistar 6y ago

For me its easy: haskell was cool for more obvious reasons but a bit much, and rust felt like an interesting yet practical very strongly typed language.

jahaja 6y ago

I think it's much about preference, some like simpler languages, some like more expressive ones. I for one have a really hard time liking expressive ones, hence Go & Zig is my small but high-quality toolbox rather than a larger toolbox. I just can't get that excited about the language itself beyond a certain point, I just want simple, predictable high-quality tools to help me produce simple, high-quality code and applications. Anyway, all of the above is ofc subjective.

pron 6y ago

My impression was completely the opposite. I was very excited about Rust at first, especially the ownership system, but after a while I saw that it was a cleaned-up C++ with most of C++'s problems (one of the most complex programming languages in software history; very slow feedback loop). Zig, on the other hand, seems revolutionary and a complete rethinking, from the ground-up, of what low-level programming should be. True, Rust is probably 100x more popular, but is still well below 1% market adoption, so we're comparing two rounding errors in terms of adoption.

the_mitsuhiko 6y ago
Rust is trying to replace C++. If you were not in the market for C++ to begin with it's unlikely that Rust is going to excite you.
- pron 6y ago
  That's one way of looking at it, but that I'm shopping for a C++ replacement doesn't mean I'll necessarily like another C++-like language. C++ is my primary language, and if I replace it -- given that switching a new language is very costly no matter which new language I pick -- I might as well wait for a more revolutionary replacement, that fixes all/most problems I have with it, rather than just a few. I don't know if Zig is that thing just yet, but it looks more promising -- to me, given my particular taste -- than Rust. But, TBF, I was very excited about Rust at first, so my excitement for Zig might wane as well.
- mlindner 6y ago
  Rust is not "trying" to replace anything. Rust can and is used plenty for embedded programming where only C was ever used previously. People have commented they prefer writing simple command line applications in it more than they do python.
Rusky 6y ago
I really don't see how Rust has most of C++'s problems. Slow compiler, sure, though things are changing. Most complex languages in history? Only if you squint at it from 10000 feet and ignore what the complexity is doing. C++ has approximately eighteen different partially-overlapping categories of variable initialization, many of which are legacy-but-still-used! [0] And some of those categories have changed their boundaries every language version since C++11 (based on the definition of "aggregate"). C++ has three to five partially-overlapping kinds of type inference all in active use (auto, decltype(id), decltype((expr)), decltype(auto), template argument deduction)! This is interleaved with name lookup and overload resolution (below), so if some subexpression isn't compiling how you expect, you have a vast space of language features potentially to blame. C++ has so many kinds of name lookup and namespacing that I'm not even sure how to count them. There's unqualified lookup, argument-dependent lookup, qualified lookup, class member access, etc. Sometimes you can't refer to things defined later (outside a class) and sometimes you can (inside a class). There is even undefined behavior if you mess up namespacing! (Undiagnosed ODR violations are every experienced C++ programmer's nightmare.) C++ has ad-hoc overload resolution based on un-scoped identifiers, which even crosses namespace boundaries using one of the above name lookup modes. It has two kinds of user-defined implicit conversions ("explicit" and implicit) that also affect this selection process, on top of the zoo of "type promotions" inherited from C. C++ classes have five to six kinds of "special member functions," some of which may be defined automatically by the compiler, each with its own rules for when and how, based on what else is defined in the class. These also contribute to overload resolution, of course. [0]: https://blog.tartanllama.xyz/initialization-is-bonkers/ https://blog.tartanllama.xyz/initialization-is-bonkers/ Rust has a complexity of its own, but it's quite different in scale and quality. There is exactly one way to initialize a variable, exactly one kind of type inference, only two ways for names to be resolved (directly or via an imported trait). Overloading, implicit conversions (of which there is only one kind, Deref), and the replacement for "special member functions" (Copy, Clone, Drop) are all based on exactly one mechanism (again, traits). The article has a pretty accurate description of how people experience Rust's remaining C++-like complexity, IMO: "I don't remember the order in which methods are resolved during autoderefencing, or how module visibility works, or how the type system determines if one impl might overlap another or be an orphan." But one important aspect it leaves out (not being a C++ article) is that if you mess up any of these, you just get a compiler error- and Rust is well-known for having extremely helpful error messages. In C++ you may get a compiler error (known for being extremely unhelpful) or you may get undefined behavior. Zig is certainly a smaller language than either C++ or Rust, but that comes at a cost. I would much rather hear discussion of those actual trade-offs than yet another "Rust is just as complicated as C++" non-claim.

gridlockd 6y ago

> I quite honestly wonder sometimes why Rust excited me so much when I first started using it, but I do not get such excitement from Zig. Good! Maybe you can actually get something done using it then, instead of getting lost in mastering lots of concepts just for the sake of it.