Google has already started to use Rust in their android operating system. Linux started getting Rust stuff. Rust has the speed of C/C++ while having memory safety. Zig does not have the same memory safety as Rust, it's a mere C/C++ alternative. Does that answer your question?
this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2024
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Windows now also has Rust in the Kernel
Rust. It's a qualitative improvement over the old ways.
The future won't belong to Rust itself, but one of its descendants. Rust is too clunky to be the ultimate expression of its best ideas.
In what ways do you feel Rust is too clunky and how do you think it could be improved? Not looking to argue or even disagree necessarily; I'm just curious where that perspective comes from.
Async is weird, and the generics salad stuff is clunky.
Just my gut feeling as well.
Here's some of my personal complaints. I don't in general know how to fix them.
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proc_macros need their own crate
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generics cause problems. Many useful macros can't handle them. Try using a generic that's a complex async function, then pass a closure to it.
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There's this kind of weird mismatch where sometimes you want an enum wrapping various types, and in others generics. I find my data flows switching back and forth.
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async in rust is actually really good, but go does it better. I don't think rust could match go without becoming a different language.
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Traits are just a big mess. Trait implementations with generics have to be mutually exclusive, but there aren't any good tools to make them so. The orphaned trait rule is necessary to keep the language sane but is incredibly restricting. Just today I find certain a attribute macros for impls that doesn't work on trait impls. I guess I have to write wrappers for every trait method.
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The "new type" pattern. Ugh. Just make something like a type alias that creates a distinct type. This one's probably easy to fix.
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Cargo is truly great, but it's a mystery to me right now how I'm going to get it to work with certain packaging systems.
To me, Rust is a bunch of great pieces that don't fit together well.
- Cargo is truly great, but it's a mystery to me right now how I'm going to get it to work with certain packaging systems.
Yeah, Cargo itself doesn't deal with any of the bundling after the executable is built.
For that stuff, the efforts are certainly still ongoing. There's no grand unified tool yet.
If you just want e.g. a DEB file, then you probably want this: https://crates.io/crates/cargo-deb
But if you want to do more in CI, then there's kind of three popular options that I'm aware of.
just: More or less a shell script runner, and kind of likemake.cargo-make: A lot of effort has been put into this, it's certainly got a good amount of features, but personally not a fan, since it makes you write a custom TOML format and then ideally you should be writing a custom script language, DuckScript. You can also use Rust scripts with it, which we tried, but there was just no way of passing parameters between tasks.cargo-xtask: This is not a tool, it's a pattern, basically just build your own build tool. It does have its downfalls, you're not going to build good caching into your own build tool, for example. But in principle I find this quite workable, as you get to write your CI code in Rust. There's also more and more community-made libraries to aid with that.
Thanks, I've save your comment. I haven't heard of any of these.
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Rust is a bunch of great pieces that don't fit together well.
That might change over time.
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Zig is a modern C. Rust is a (modern) alternative to C++. So two different languages can exist alongside each other, just like C and C++.
Unless Zig starts its own cult, I feel Rust will win in the end.
The thing with rust is that it is awesome. It does exactly what it promises and everyone keeps going on about.
If you want to talk cult talk to c developers. They are so indoctrinated. They say things like "undefined behaviour is fine you just have to code around it" "it's great there's almost no surface area to the standard lib as you can now trust your fellow developers to perfectly write all constructs" "yeah it causes uncountable security vulnerabilities (even when written by it's foremost experts) but that's unskilled developers and not a language problem"
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Is zig memory safe by design? If not, rust will "win". Large companies aren't going to hire for an unknown or unpopular memory unsafe language when they already have C or C++ - there's just no contest.
Last I read, zig didn't even have a standard string library. Unless that changes, it won't even be a viable alternative to C/C++.
Edit: I checked and got this
the Zig language, like C, entrusts memory management to humans, placing full trust in human development. Zig then provides some memory safety checks to ensure memory safety. However, it still lacks the strict compile-time guarantees of Rust’s ownership system and borrow checker. Therefore, when writing Zig code, developers need to pay more attention to potential memory safety issues and ensure that errors and exceptional situations are handled correctly.
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Who wants oxidised Metal when you can take off every Zig! You know what you doing!? Move Zig. For great justice.
Rust is named after the fungus, not oxidized metal
it’s pronounced “gif”
Python is named after Monty python and not the snake
Brainfuck is named after... uh, something
So, you are telling Rust is named after the pathogenic fungus (cause disease) and the logo is a crab, just like the logo of Cancer?
That fits well with the language and its community. Well done!
and that's the way we likes it
What is so wrong with people being excited about a language they like? I have always found the Rust community extremely welcoming and caring.
Take the joke and go home ffs.
In my entire life I have never seen anything in programming anywhere near as unimaginably toxic as the Rust community.
They have a hammer and damnit if they aren't going to prove its the best tool for brain surgery.
Isn't exactly this kind of thing what is mostly responsible for the demise of Perl?
As I heard it told, the developers of Perl worked so long & hard on the next version after Perl 5, but then veered off to make a new language (Raku) and despite the reality being otherwise, people feared so much that Perl would die (i.e. that 6 would never materialize) that in the meantime "everyone" had switched to Python (despite it clearly being an inferior language - hehehehe:-P).
So that would be a "con" I suppose, if fights over which language is better ends up diluting efforts to work on or with either.
Isn’t exactly this kind of thing what is mostly responsible for the demise of Perl?
Perl died because better tools became available.
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the demise of Perl
You imply this is a bad thing
I have never quite understood this mode of thinking - I think it must be an imprecise statement. Yes, improper usage of Perl coding can be bad, but then so too can C/C++ with e.g. improper memory management? Yet, I don't see people knocking down doors to learn the memory-safe Rust (and e.g. thereby be able to contribute to the Lemmy codebase), probably bc despite it being "better", it also has a steep learning curve (and I don't even know but I would assume: even for someone who already knows C?). Instead, people seem to want to learn Go, or Java - okay so that's a rabbit hole b/c they are for entirely different purposes, but anyway I mean that each language has its own balance of trade-offs.
So while on the one hand the worst-case scenario from a poor coder for Perl seems significantly worse than for Python, there are also benefits too: doesn't Perl run up to 20x faster than Python, which is why many places e.g. booking.com have chosen to use it? In the hands of an experienced person, perl code is quite readable, while in contrast, I just absolutely HATE aspects of Python such as whitespace delimiting and the package management, plus I don't know if I am imagining things (is is likely) but the code just seems to me to look obtuse, by comparison.
Sometimes I'll use awk, other times I'll bump that up to a Perl one-liner or even full script, still other times demand Python or for number-crunching full C/C++, or Java for whatever reason, but... for things that you want fast & easy, I don't really see Perl as "bad"? Granted, it shouldn't be someone's first language these days, compared to C or Python, but what is wrong with it, like awk, continuing to exist these days? Especially if it's not in a production environment.
I'm listening.
Collaboration is a fact of life in software development.
Therefore we must choose tools based not on a single developer’s preference, but by what their colleagues can use effectively.
- Tools that are easy to write bugs with (C/C++)
- Tools that are hard to learn (Perl)
- Tools that are hard to hire for (Perl, Ruby)
All of these should be fixed or shunned in favor of languages that are easier to hire, easier to learn, and easier to debug.
So *I* who am careful to write readable and safe code, have to use a non-preferred language preference b/c someone else cannot handle using it properly?!
Sadly, that is the realization that I have come to as well. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link and all that... but no, really, that's true, b/c modifications are likely to be made at some point (kinda biasing towards production there but even so, answers with perl one-liners on e.g. StackOverflow are ubiquitous, but someone would have to know the language to be able to modify them to suit their specific use-case, so also not at the same time).
Fwiw I really did not think that Perl was hard to learn - though that was coming from the likes of assembly, various Basic styles, C/C++, and having already learned regular expressions via Unix e.g. grep and awk and sed. "Regular expressions" are quite a steep learning curve, though that's not the same thing as Perl, and quite frankly Perl is the undisputed (iirc?) master of them all, so whether someone wanted to write Perl without those, or wanted to do try to do regular expressions without Perl, either way Perl seems good for having included regular expressions, not something to penalize the entire language for. Also, C/C++ (and Rust) has a bit of a known learning curve as well...:-) Though indeed it's entirely fair to say that if someone were to pick just one language, then I would be hard pressed to find any justification for that being Perl. C/C++, Java, Python - all of these, depending on the situation, are fine choices, whereas Perl is absolutely niche.
But even so, why would it follow that it would necessarily be a good thing if Perl, or let's say awk, would fully "go away"? I kinda see Perl and awk as being in the same boat these days - both niche and powerful, yet both steadily becoming obsolete? Just b/c something else is "better" doesn't mean that everything else must die. Except, as you mentioned, for reasons of collaboration and thus code-reuse. Even there though, putting all of our eggs into a single basket scares me: what if tomorrow Microsoft, or Google, decides to purchase the rights to Python and suddenly control that entire industry sector in one fell swoop?
Personal projects vs everything else:
Did you want to collaborate with other people? Use something other people like.
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So I who am careful to write readable and safe code
I just want to point out that it's hard to be sure your code is readable if you don't work with a team. More than once I saw people write "readable" code that was not readable. My own code I deemed "readable" was in fact not, as time had shown when I returned to fix something. So, the cited part looks a bit arrogant 😅
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Since you're asking today the answer is Rust because it is already more mature. In 5-10 years if you asked them the answer might be different if zig sticks around.
This is no shade against zig! It's just very new. It doesn't have a 1.0 release yet.
Also, they're very different languages with very different goals. They aren't necessarily competing in the same space.
It's too early to tell.
Rust has a killer feature and a tonne of buzz, but poor ergonomics.
Zig is developing into simple elegance and wonderful interop, but has more work to do before it will be widely usable.
It's entirely possible that ideas and lessons taken from them will inspire another language that ends up eclipsing them both.
I would say at this point in time it’s clearly decided that Rust will be part of the future. Maybe there’s a meaningful place for Zig too, but that’s the only part that’s too early to tell.
If you think Zig still has a chance at overtaking Rust though, that’s very much wishful thinking. Zig isn’t memory safe, so any areas where security is paramount are out of reach for it. The industry isn’t going back in that direction.
I actually think Zig might still have a chance in game development, and maybe in specialized areas where Rust’s borrow checker cannot really help anyway, such as JIT compilers.
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I assume they will both be here for the long term but for different things.
I don't think there's much crossover between the two though and I'm not sure this'll change. Rust code looks a lot like modern strongly typed languages and the memory/performance stuff is abstracted away for most use cases. While Zig looks a lot like C with pointers and writing your allocators. I think Rust is probably easier to grasp for most Devs.
Rust is also already entrenched, android, chrome, windows, JS ecosystem, Python ecosystem, it's everywhere. While Zig doesn't have the adoption yet.
Why not both?
I hope that someone in the 40 comments i don't have time to read right now has pointed out that the premise of OP is flawed for the simple reason that Rust hit v1.0 in 2015, while Zig is still nowhere near that milestone in 2024.
So we are not even talking about the same "future" period from the start.
So, no need to get to the second false premise in OP, which is limiting a "future" period to one successful dominating language only. Nor is there a need to go beyond these premises and discuss actual language details/features.
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What are your goals?
If you want to learn another language just for the fun of it (the best reason) than learn both.
Of you want to improve your tool set to be able to land a job, then there is no good answer. Probably some other high level language like Python, Java, JavaScript, C#. Etc.
Also: Zig bay be easier to get started when coming from C, because it is mostly imperative.
Rust introduces concepts from functional programming. This could be interesting for you, of you don't have any experience in functional programming to get in touch with other programming styles. Or not, of you explicitly don't want to learn such things.
I use both languages, and I enjoy both. Shameless plug: I've written a blog post ~ 2 years ago what I like about each language: https://zigurust.gitlab.io/blog/posts/three-things/
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