Comment by foltik

It’s precisely not syntactic ceremony. It’s normal Zig running at compile time in which you can program types as values. In Rust (and most other languages) all you get is a highly abstract DSL:

Foo<T> where for<‘a> T: Bar<‘a, baz(): Send>

Information dense, but every new feature needs language design work. Zig lets you express arbitrary logic, loops, conditionals, etc. It’s lower level of abstraction than a type constraints DSL.

For example, adding “the method in this trait is Send” to Rust’s DSL took a whole RFC and new syntax. The Zig equivalent could be implemented with an if statement on a type at comptime.

Or how about the transformation of an async function into a state machine. Years of work, deep compiler integration, no way to write such transforms yourself. Same with generators, which still aren’t stable. I’d really like to be able to write these things like any other program.

If you don’t want or need to express things at this lower level of abstraction, fair, same reason most people stick to scripting languages and don’t think about memory layout. But “extra ceremony” is really underselling it.