Comment by 90s_dev
2 days ago
Yeah but it's Zig. Rust is for when you want to write C but have it be easier. Zig is when you want it to be harder than C, but with more control over execution and allocation as a trade off.
2 days ago
Yeah but it's Zig. Rust is for when you want to write C but have it be easier. Zig is when you want it to be harder than C, but with more control over execution and allocation as a trade off.
For anyone who wants to form their own opinion about whether this style of programming is easier or harder than it would be in other languages:
https://github.com/ziglang/zig/blob/0.14.1/lib/std/zig/token...
The tokenizer is not really a good demonstration of the differences between these styles. A more representative comparison would be the later stages that build, traverse, and manipulate tree and graph data structures.
OK, parser then:
https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/tree/1.87.0/compiler/rustc... (main logic seems to be in expr.rs)
vs
https://github.com/ziglang/zig/blob/0.14.1/lib/std/zig/Parse...
Again, for those who wish to form their own opinions.
3 replies →
I had almost the exact opposite experience.
I share this impression. I’ve never worked much with low level languages with the exception of a few university assignments. I did last years advent of code in Zig and was quite productive and never really struggled with the language that much. Meanwhile, rust makes things a lot more complicated on my current project.
The main benefit of rust over zig seems to be the maturity. Rust has had a decade+ to stabilize and build an ecosystem while Zig is still a very new language
Zig is C with a better syntax, easy things are easy to do, but for hard things you're on your own with no borrow checker friend to cover your back.
Also Rust makes you think more upfront (like string handling), which makes it more complicated for advent of code kind of stuff but vastly reduces bugs later on.