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.
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.