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Comment by pmeunier | Hacker News Reader

Wait, nobody in the Pijul team brags about being in Rust. If Pijul were written today it would probably be in Zig, for many reasons.

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I'm fascinated by this. I like both Rust and Zig, but I would have guessed that for the kind of complex data structure manipulation required for CRDTs and other clever algorithms Pijul employs, the degree reliable correctness Rust gives you would win out. Are you doing something (like entity-component models?) that disables much of Rust's smarts? Or is it just that much more pleasant to program in Zig?

I've done very little Zig, so this may not be very informed. Indeed we don't use Rust intrinsically that much. With associated type constructors, Rust would be the best language (I know of) to write Pijul in. Without it, most of the polymorphism uses macros anyway. Zig or Rust would make little difference for Sanakirja I believe, and this is where the entire CRDT thing is done.

As somebody who's interested in both languages and follow zog development relatively closely I'm interested in these many reasons. Can you give a few example of zig features or other reasons that would be useful for Pijul over Rust?

It's mostly about Rust adding lots of features I am not interested in, and not adding the ones I need for the project. Sanakirja was hard to write in Rust, not a single concept of the language matched what I needed, in the end I had to write tons of macros, and the API is hard to use. Zig would have probably made it more natural from the beginning.

There are other things related to the community/zealots/Mozilla/Rust foundation, but I'm not sure this is the proper place.

Edit: Git zealots are worse than Rust zealots, I attribute this to Git being "harder to learn" (i.e. never really does what people think it does) than Rust.

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