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Rust has been my primary language for the past 5 years, but it's moving in a direction that gets it farther away from my own values about what software ought to

Rust has been my primary language for the past 5 years, but it's moving in a direction that gets it farther away from my own values about what software ought to be like. As more features are added to the language, the ways they interact with each other increases the overall complexity of the language and it becomes hard to keep up. I really like the safety guarantees that Rust provides and I want to keep enjoying them, but the language -- and more importantly, its ecosystem -- is moving from something that was relatively simple to a weird mish-mash of C++, JavaScript, and Haskell, and I'm keeping an eye out for a possible escape hatch. Zig, Odin, or Hare are not on the same plane of existence as Rust when it comes to out-of-the-box safety (or, at the moment, out-of-the-box suitability for writing production-grade software), but they are simpler and intend to remain that way. That really jives with my values. Yes, this means that some of the complexity of writing software is pushed back onto me, the programmer, but I feel that I have a better shot at writing good software with a simple language than with a complex language where I only superficially understand the features.

brabel 4y ago
> have a better shot at writing good software with a simple language than with a complex language where I only superficially understand the features. That's exactly how I feel too. No matter how much I use Rust, I find it nearly impossible to claim I understand a lot of its features. Zig OTOH is basically what C would look like if designed today! The improvements it offers over C are very compelling to me... it remains to be seen if the lack of formal guarantees that Rust gives still makes Zig programs similarly as buggy as C programs, but my current impression is that Zig programs are going to be very far away from C's in terms of safety issues... the features the blog post mention go a long way.

brabel 4y ago

> have a better shot at writing good software with a simple language than with a complex language where I only superficially understand the features. That's exactly how I feel too. No matter how much I use Rust, I find it nearly impossible to claim I understand a lot of its features. Zig OTOH is basically what C would look like if designed today! The improvements it offers over C are very compelling to me... it remains to be seen if the lack of formal guarantees that Rust gives still makes Zig programs similarly as buggy as C programs, but my current impression is that Zig programs are going to be very far away from C's in terms of safety issues... the features the blog post mention go a long way.