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Comment by TheMagicHorsey | Hacker News Reader

After using Rust on a couple of projects, I understand the appeal of simpler languages like C3, Zig, and Odin. As one commenter very aptly put on the Zig subreddit ... "I used Zig for (internal tool) because I wanted to quickly write my tool and debug it, and not spend all my time debugging my knowledge of Rust."

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Is Zig really that common at this point that you'd feel comfortable using it for a work project? Its not just going to piss off the next person and have them need to rewrite it? I guess Rust has the same problem to some extent but there is a lot of resources for writing Rust out there now

I suppose the nice thing about zig is that for many things, porting back to C is relatively straightforward and if you wanted to incrementally do it, there's a way to do that, too.

I wouldn't use Zig for something production critical, but other people like TigerBeetle have decided its good enough for them, and they seem to be doing fine commercially, so I just refrain from saying its not production ready.

But one things for sure ... there's just not a lot of sample Zig code out there. Granted its simpler than Rust, but your average AI tool doesn't get how to write idiomatic Zig. Whereas most AI tools seem to get Rust code okay. Maybe idiomatic Zig just isn't a thing yet. Or maybe idiomatic Zig is just like idiomatic C ... in the eye of the beholder.

Depends on the project and the team, yeah? In my opinion, Zig is simple and lends itself to simpler patterns. Ultimately though it's always a trade-off to consider talent, project scope, team preferences, technical challenges, long-term maintenance, etc.

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