Comment by littlestymaar

> The key problem with Zig nowadays is how much of its community and adoption is driven by anti-Rust sentiment. As a result, while Rust puts beginner onboarding and documentation at the center of its culture, as opposed to the “C neckbeard”'s culture, Zig is going the other way around.

Maybe, or maybe the fact that Zig is a small independent project with limited resources has also something to do with it, and this kind of shaming says less about Zig than you'd think.

When I first joined the Zig project, Zig was still using the bootstrap compiler written in C++ that would not free memory (it took more than 4GB to compile the Zig compiler). Some people at the time were asking us to prioritize work on the package manager but Andrew rightfully wanted to prioritize rewriting the compiler instead. In hindsight this was the obviously right decision: a package manager implies that one can very easily add an order of magnitude more code to their project, stressing the performance of the compiler. If we had not prioritized core infrastructure over giving people what they wanted faster, today we would have people complaining that adding a single dependency to their project makes the build impossible to complete.

The Zig project has a huge scope and we are a small independent organization. This makes us extremely nimble and efficient, but it does mean that we need to do things in the order that makes the most sense for the project, not for what the public wants.

The fact that we develop in the open doesn't mean that the language is ready yet.

People that already have the required domain knowledge (and who have a tolerance for breaking changes) will have the opportunity to be early adopters if they wish to do so, others will have to wait for Zig to become more mature. And we do make this clear in releases and all forms of public communication.

We have gone a long way since the bootstrap compiler days, but we are still missing key infrastructure:

- we have a x86_64 custom backend but aarch64 is not complete yet - incremental compilation is showing that we can get instant rebuilds of large projects, but it has missing features and it doesn't work on all platforms yet - we need native fuzzing since AFL keeps regressing everytime a new version of LLVM comes out - for the longest time we haven't had a strong I/O story, now we're finally working on it

The time for paving the road for a new generation of programmers will come (it's in the ZSF mission statement btw), but first we need to finish the plumbing.

Not only, the whole handmade movement puts me off.

It is the anti-intelectualism from Go culture, gone wild against C++, Rust, Swift, anything modern, or even tools, using game engines versus doing the whole computer from scratch for a game.

That is actually a valid point on expectation given the attracted people's demographic.

I will hopefully wait for comments from Ghostty, Bun or Tigerbeetle Devs.

On another point that is wroth mentioning, I hope Andrew will at least put it out publicly, IMO Zig isn't Anti-Rust. But it did attract the type of people who are not too happy with Rust. I dont remember a single time Zig came out to bash anything about Rust. It isn't Anti anything at all. Its goal is to be a decent C replacement as very high level assembly languages, aiming at Data Oriented Design with some interesting features, and extremely fast compilation speed. ( Which was the reason why I was interested in it in the first place. I miss Turbo Pascal )

Zig reminds me of the old school, traditional projects. It isn't perfect for everything, it never claims to be, if you like it, use it. If not, there are plenty of options out there.

At least Ghostty Dev seems to be enjoying it almost every day.

> anti-Rust sentiment

I have not seen much of any anti-Rust sentiment in the community. There's a lot of people in the community who do Rust, like rust, and work on rust projects. If the Zig community has an anti-anything sentiment, it's against C++.