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When Zig is safer and faster than (unsafe) Rust (zackoverflow.dev)

submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by erlend_sh to c/[email protected]

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There are endless debates online about Rust vs. Zig, this post explores a side of the argument I don't think is mentioned enough.

Intro / TLDR

I was intrigued to learn that the Roc language rewrote their standard library from Rust to Zig. What made Zig the better option?

They wrote that they were using a lot of unsafe Rust and it was getting in their way. They also mentioned that Zig had “more tools for working in a memory-unsafe environment, such as reporting memory leaks in tests”, making the overall process much better.

So is Zig a better alternative to writing unsafe Rust?

I wanted to test this myself and see how hard unsafe Rust would be by building a project that required a substantial amount of unsafe code.

Then I would re-write the project in Zig to see if would be easier/better.

After I finished both versions, I found that the Zig implementation was safer, faster, and easier to write. I’ll share a bit about building both and what I learned.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

I don't think it's fair to consider unsafe Rust such a small subset of the language that it requires calling it out as a separate thing from "Rust" in the title of an article. Unsafe constructs are necessary in the standard library and many crates, whether or not you use it in the code you actually write.