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Comment by ryao | Hacker News Reader

Zig replacing Rust is not my prediction. It is what I am hearing from the Zig enthusiast I know. I have also seen others express the sentiment that the next fashionable language after Rust will be Zig. Regardless of whether it is Zig, there will be another. Rust is just one part of a never ending cycle of people trying to reinvent programming.

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There's approximately a 0% chance of Zig seeing non-trivial adoption anywhere other than maybe the embedded world.

It otherwise solves basically nobodies problems in the real world and is just a love letter to C. It's cute, kinda, but that's about it.

Zig is like the Vulcan Centaur next to Starship.

> Rust is just one part of a never ending cycle of people trying to reinvent programming.

This is true of every single programming language.

That is my complaint against the next fashionable language. Once you have some level of proficiency in around 10 languages, adding more to the list is a chore. It lacks the enjoyment that came from the first few. At least, that is my experience. That is why I am resistant to learning new languages unless software I want to modify is already written in it. Then, I am forced to learn and time spent on it is time that actually needed to be spent, unlike my brief time spent teaching myself FORTRAN in college, which was largely a waste of time.

> Zig enthusiasts

Yeah, don’t you think they might be perhaps just slightly biased? I have some news for you about your average technology enthusiast…

Anyone who claims Zig is going to replace Rust knows nothing about either Zig, Rust, or both. Zig is designed to solve none of the problems that Rust solves. Trillion-dollar corporations are rewriting things in Rust because it solves problems that really matter to them.

The US government strongly recommends writing all new mission-critical code in memory-safe languages. Guess which one of Rust and Zig is memory-safe?

I have nothing against Zig, it looks like a very nice better C, and the comptime stuff is both cool and useful. But its priorities are not Rust’s priorities.

Of course, Rust evangelists are also more than slightly biased.

Of course.

> Rust is just one part of a never ending cycle of people trying to reinvent programming.

Which is good. Programming is an open field, ideas are constantly popping in and out and you sometimes need to reinvent things to prove that they are worth it. More languages is a good thing, the bizarre tribalism around them is dangerous, but it is not possible to prevent it, people gotta be people.

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