Comment by _pdp_

You, by your own admission, haven't even written a single line of Zig despite having ~31 Zig projects on GitHub. I don't think your knowledge of the language is to be trusted in almost any capacity. This might seem harsh but I don't trust someone who's experience with a language amounts to slopping out 30+ repositories and not even engaging with the language normally.

Industry standards, existing team knowledge, use after free story is the same as C already has.

> There is no sense pretending anymore that languages with as many gotchas as C and Zig are "simple". Quite simply, they are not. The complexities lie in what's left unspoken, unaddressed, and of course undefined; failure to comprehend these completely can be catastrophic.

This is where I’ve arrived too. After nearly 20 years of programming I feel done with leaving foot guns lying around. Languages that are full of them, but “fine” as long as you take extreme care are not interesting to me. I’ve started calling this “simple as long as you avoid all the foot guns” idea the sword juggling fallacy[0].

It’s too bad about Zig because it has many nice ideas, in particular allocators, that I hope Rust or some future language will adopt.

0: https://hugotunius.se/2026/06/15/the-sword-juggling-fallacy....

There is more to it even, the UNIX and C founders arrived to Go, before retirement, after a few other interactions.

AT&T was the one doing the Cyclone research.

And then we have a bunch of folks assuming they know better about C that its own authors?

You didn't just quote The Institute of Typesafe Memetic Research as proof of anything...

It's a shitposting, hyperbolic bait account. As funny as calling Andrew Kelley Smelley, it's not meant to be taken as gospel.

The post you linked to seems to jump to conclusions, to say the least. For example:

> One probable outcome of an unsafe-language-dominant world is full Andrew communism, which is precisely what Andrew “Smelley” Kelley proposes: abolish ICE and replace the market economy with a globally distributed network of community-maintained allocators.

> Rather than a commercial product, software becomes a “public good,” ultimately provided by the Zig Software Foundation as manually managed digital infrastructure.

Calling him "smelley"? Really? Pulling in the political views of the founder of a language and claiming that they inform his language design as part of a grand conspiracy against Rust/capitalism? Where are they getting all of this? Free, open-source compilers and related tooling (both of which Rust and Zig have) are already public goods managed by global communities of mostly volunteers

> This future strikes me as a dystopian hellscape, but I have never met an unsafe-language advocate who could explain how this ecosystem is supposed to sustain itself without unpaid maintainers, ideological volunteers, subsidized infrastructure, and endless donations to compiler projects that still cannot protect users from basic memory errors.

How is Rust any different than Zig in this respect? Both are projects largely run by nonprofits relying on communities to promote, maintain, and improve them.

Frankly, that entire "Institute for Type Safe Memetic Research" seems like either an elaborate satire or an account run by genuinely insane people who think type and memory safety are paramount societal issues.

Based.