For example, a command line utility. In a CLI tool you typically don't free memory. You just allocate and exit and let the OS clean up memory.

Historically compilers were all like this, they didn't free memory, they just compiled a single file and then exited! This ended up being a problem when compilers moved more into a service model (constant compilation in the background, needing to do whole program optimization, loading into memory and being called on demand to compile snippets, etc), but for certain problem classes, not worrying about memory safety is just fine.

Zig makes it easy to create an allocator, use it, then just free up all the memory in that region.

Right tool for the job and all that.

The sad exception is obviously that Rust's std collections are not built on top of it, and neither is almost anything else.

But nevertheless, I think this means it's not a Zig vs Rust thing, it's a Zig stdlib vs Rust stdlib thing, and Rust's stdlib can be replaced via #[no_std]. In the far future, it's likely someone will make a Zig-like stdlib for Rust too, with a &dyn Allocator inside collections.

This exists in the nightly edition of Rust, but is unlikely to become a feature in its current form because the alternative of "Storages" seems to be a lot more flexible and to have broader applicability.

If you were to add borrow checking to Zig, it would make it much easier to justify using it at my current workplace.

http://github.com/ityonemo/clr

was where i got last year. this december im doing a "prototype" which means its going to be done in zig and im going to clear sone difficult hurdles i couldn't do last year.... also accepting sponsors, details on page.

also disclaimer, im using heavy amounts of ai assistance (as implied in the preview video)

People love to say this, but C++ is routinely taught as a first programming language to novice programmers (this used to be even more clearly the case before Java and Python largely took on that role) and Rust is undoubtedly simpler than C++.

The nice thing about Rust as First Language (which I'm not sure I'd endorse, but it can't be as bad as C++) is that because safe Rust ropes off so many footguns it's extremely unlikely that you'll be seriously injured by your lack of understanding as a beginner. You may not be able to do something because you didn't yet understand how - or you might do something in a terribly sub-optimal way, but you're not likely to accidentally write nonsense without realising and have that seem to work.

For example yesterday there was that piece where the author seems to have misunderstood how heap allocation works in Rust. But, in safe Rust that's actually harmless. If they write their mistake it won't compile, maybe they figure out why, maybe they give up and can't use heap allocation until they learn more.

I haven't thought too hard about Zig as first language, because to me the instability rules that out. Lecturers hate teaching moving targets.

Rust just feels natural now. Possibly because I was exposed to this harsh universe of problems early. Most of the stupid traps that I fell into are clearly marked and easy to avoid.

It's just so easy to write C++ that seems like it works until it doesn't...

The main thing a lot of had going for us was 5-10 years of experience with Basic, Pascal and other languages before anyone tried to teach us C++. Those who came in truly unprepared often struggled quite badly.

This thread is about Zig though! I want to like Zig but it has many annoyances... just the other day I learned that you must not print to stdout in a unit test (or any code being unit tested!) as that simply hangs the test runner. No error, no warning, it just hangs. WTF who thinks that's ok?!

But I think Zig is really getting better with time, like Java did and perhaps as slowly. Some stdlib APIs used to suck terribly but they got greatly improved in Zig 0.15 (http, file IO and the whole Writergate thing), so I don't know, I guess Zig may become a really good language given some more time, perhaps a couple of years?!

You can subset C++ and still knock out a program.

You cannot subset Rust and still create a program.

But Rust is a dramatically smaller language than C++. The various subsets of C++ people usually carve out tend to be focused on particular styles of programming, like “no exceptions” or “no RTTI”. Notably never things like “signed integer overflow is now defined”, or “std::launder() is now unnecessary”.

When you have this stuff in "Hello World":

Egui Hello World:

    ui.add(egui::Slider::new(&mut age, 0..=120).text("age"));

    fn render(frame: &mut Frame) {

  fn run(mut terminal: DefaultTerminal) -> Result<()> {
      loop {
          terminal.draw(render)?;
          if matches!(event::read()?, Event::Key(_)) {
              break Ok(());
          }
      }
  }

When I can contrast this to say, ImGui C++:

  ImGui::Text("Hello, world %d", 123);
  if (ImGui::Button("Save"))
      MySaveFunction();
  ImGui::InputText("string", buf, IM_ARRAYSIZE(buf));
  ImGui::SliderFloat("float", &f, 0.0f, 1.0f);

This kind of blindness makes me wonder about what universe the people doing "Well Ackshually" about Rust live in.

Rust very much has an enormous learning curve and it cannot be subsetted to simplify it due to both the language and the extensive usage of libraries via Cargo.

It is what it is--and may or may not be a valid tradeoff. But failing to at least acknowledge that will simply make people wonder about the competence of the people asserting otherwise.

The rust code you pasted doesn't show any lifetime.

The `&f` in your imgui example is equivalent to the `&mut age`.

Are you just comparing the syntax? It just take a couple of hours to learn the syntax by following a tutorial and that `&mut` in rust is the same as `&` in C, not to mention that the compiler error tell you to add the `mut` if it is missing.

Also 0..=120 is much more clear than passing to arguments 0.0f, 1.0f. it makes it obvious what it is while looking at the imgui call it isn't.

† As you're apparently a C++ programmer you would call these "Non-type template parameters"

The gist of it is that Rust is (relatively) the French of programming languages. Monolingual English speakers (a stand-in here for the C/C++ school of things, along with same-family languages like Java or C#) complain a lot about all this funky syntax/semantics - from diacritics to extensive conjugations - that they've never had to know to communicate in English. They've been getting by their whole life without accents aigu or knowing what a subjunctive mood is, so clearly this is just overwrought and prissy ceremony cluttering up the language.

But for instance, the explicit and (mostly) consistent spelling and phonetics rules of French mean that figuring out how to pronounce an unfamiliar word in French is way easier than it is in English. Moods like the imperative and the subjunctive do exist in English, and it's easier to grasp proper English grammar when you know what they are. Of course, this isn't to say that there are no parts of French that an English speaker can take umbrage at - for example grammatical gender does reduce ambiguity of some complex sentences, but there's a strong argument that it's nowhere near worth the extra syntax/semantics it requires.

On top of all that, French is nowhere near as esoteric as many monolingual Anglophone learners make out; it has a lot in common with English and is easier to pick up than a more distant Romance language like Romanian, to talk of a language in a more distant family (like Greek or Polish). In fact, the overlap between French and English creates expectations of quick progress that can be frustrating when it sinks in that no, this is in fact a whole different language that has to be learned on its own terms versus just falling into place for you.

Hell, we can take this analogy as far as native French speakers being far more relaxed and casual in common use than the external reputation of Strictness™ in the language would have one believe.

- don't have english or any european language as their first language

- have learned english successfully

- are now in a long, struggling process of learning french

I don't believe there is in day-to-day life much value in the advantages you mention for french.

This view is only remotely within the bounds of plausibility if you intended for "other languages" to refer exclusively to languages requiring manual memory management

Some others are:

- `&mut T` which encodes that you have exclusive access to a value via a reference. I don't think there is any language with the same concept.

- `&T` which encodes the opposite of `&mut T` i.e. you know no one can change the value from underneath you.

- `self`/`value: T` for method receivers and argument which tells you ownership is relinquished (for non-Copy types). I think C++ can also model this with move semantics.

- `Send`/`Sync` bounds informing you how a value can and cannot be used across thread boundaries. I don't know of any language with an equivalent

- `Option<T>` and `Result<T, E>` encoding absence of values. Several other languages have equivalents, but, for example, Java's versions is less useful because they can still be `null`.

- Sum types in general. `Option<T>` and `Result<T, E>` are examples, but sum types are amazing for encoding 1-of-N possibilities. Not unique to Rust of course.

- Explicit integer promotion/demotion. Because Rust never does this implicitly you are forced to encode how it happens and think about how that can fail.

All of these are other ways Rust reduce cognitive load by encoding facts in the program text instead of relying on the programmer's working memory.

In languages like Java their version of the Billion Dollar mistake doesn't have arbitrary Undefined Behaviour but it is going to blow up your program, so you're also going to need to track that or pay everywhere to keep checking your work - and since Rust doesn't have the mistake you don't need to do that.

Likewise C# apparently doesn't have arbitrary Undefined Behaviour for data races. But it does lose Sequential Consistency, so, humans can't successfully reason about non-trivial software when that happens, whereas safe Rust doesn't have data races so no problem.

Neither of these languages can model the no-defaults case, which is trivial in Rust and, ironically, plausible though not trivial in C++. So if you have no-defaults anywhere in your problem, Rust is fine with that, languages like Go and Java can't help you, "just imagine a default into existence and code around the problem" sounds like cognitive load to me.

Edited: Fix editorial mistake

I think we've heard these arguments ad nauseum at this point, but the longer I use Rust for ensuring long-term maintenance burden is low in large systems that I have to be absolutely, 10,000% correct with the way I manage memory the more it seems to reduce the effort required to make changes to these large systems.

In scenarios where multiple people aren't maintaining a highly robust system over a long period of time, e.g. a small video game, I think I'd absolutely prefer Zig or C++ where I might get faster iteration speed and an easier ability to hit an escape hatch without putting unsafe everywhere.