Comment by flooow
1 year ago
From listening to Feldman's podcast, this doesn't really come as a surprise to me. The rigor that Rust demands seems not to jibe with his 'worse is better' approach. That coupled with the fact they already switched the stdlib from Rust to Zig. The real question I have is why he chose Rust in the first place.
Zig was not ready or nearly as popular back in 2019 when the compiler was started.
Not to mention, Richard has a background mostly doing higher level programming. So jumping all the way to something like C or Zig would have been a very big step.
Sometimes you need a stepping stone to learn and figure out what you really want.
> The real question I have is why he chose Rust in the first place.
If you read the linked post carefully you will know.
> Compile times aside, the strengths and weaknesses of Rust and Zig today are much different than they were when I wrote the first line of code in Roc's Rust compiler in 2019. Back then, Rust was relatively mature and Zig was far from where it is today.
It’s covered in TFA, but the tldr is they started when Zig was immature.