Rustler is more popular because Rust solves one of the scarier bits about NIFs, the fact that irresponsible memory management in a NIF can kill the entire Erlan

Rustler is more popular because Rust solves one of the scarier bits about NIFs, the fact that irresponsible memory management in a NIF can kill the entire Erlang VM. I can appreciate Zig for entire projects that would otherwise be written in C, but for the lengths of code that make sense for a NIF as opposed to a port, Zig seems like a strange point of failure to add to my system. If it's simple enough that I can be confident in my flawless manual memory management, I'd just use C, and for anything else, Rust is the far safer choice.