Zig is a middle ground. It solves some of the common foot-guns in C, Without the costs of affine substructural typing that offers Rust its super powers.

I am of the opinion that it is horses for courses and not a universal better proposition.

Because my needs don’t fit in with Rust’s decisions very well I will use zig for personal projects when needed. I just need linked lists, graphs etc…

While hopefully someone can provide a more comprehensive explanation here are the two huge wins for my use case.

1) In Zig, accessing an array or slice out of bounds is considered detectable illegal behavior.

2) defer[0] allows you to collocate the the freeing of resources with code.

That at least ‘feels’ safer to me than a bunch of ‘unsafe’ rust that is required for my very specific use case.

I was working on some eBPF code in C and did really miss zig.

For me it fits the Pareto principle but zig is also just a sometimes food for me, so take that for what it is worth.

[0] https://zig.guide/language-basics/defer/

Zig doesn't even have RAII...

zig is unmanaged memory. But rust also allows memory leaks, and they're not uncommon in large, complex programs. So this rewrite will not necessarily control for that.

Nope! Zig is like C in this regard. There’s no borrow checker. Managing memory is your responsibility.

It gives you a few more tools than C - like a debug allocator, bounds checked array slices and so on. But it’s not a memory safe language like rust.

It is quite obvious that Zig is pre 1.0 with thousands of stranded unsolved issues (per their GitHub repo). A review of Zig hype gives the strong impression it was created by being relentlessly and suspiciously pushed on HN, beyond logic or its language rankings (per TIOBE or GitHub stats), so that many were under the illusion that the language was something more or other than what it really is.

Zig is still under development and beta. Stability, crashes, and leaks should not be surprising, and even expected. To stick with a beta language, usually companies and developers are philosophically and/or financially aligned with the language. An example is JangaFX and Odin, where they not only have committed to using the language (despite being beta) in their products, but have directly hired GingerBill.

Team Bun appears to have "alignment and relationship issues" with Zig, to the point they have decided to extensively explore their options. Now Bun is rewritten in Rust. They are seeing if Rust solves their requirements. As with any relationship, if one ignores or takes a partner for granted, don't be surprised if they want a divorce or jump to someone else.