Was going to say this, but I don't think anyone actually wants to hear that Rust actually would have helped here.

As you're saying, the bug was the equivalent of an incorrectly written Drop implementation.

Nothing against Zig, and people not using Rust is just fine, but this is what happens when you want C-like feel for your language. You miss out on useful abstractions along with the superfluous ones.

"We don't need destructors, defer/errdefer is enough" is Zig's stance, and it was mostly OK.

Impossible to predict this kind of issue when choosing a project language (and it's already been discussed why Zig was chosen over Rust for Ghostty, which is fine!), so it's not a reason to always choose Rust over Zig, but sometimes that slightly annoying ceremony is useful!

Maybe some day I'll be smart enough to write Zig as a default over Rust, but until that day I'm going to pay the complexity price to get more safety and keep more safety mechanisms on the shotgun aimed at my foot. I've got plenty of other bugs I can spend time writing.

Another good example is the type vs type alias vs wrapper type debate. It's probably not reasonable to use a wrapper type every single time (e.g. num_seconds probably can probably be a u32 and not a Seconds type), but it's really a Rorschach test because some people lean towards one end versus the other for whatever reason, and the plusses/minuses are different depending on where you land on the spectrum.

[EDIT] also some good discussion here

https://ziggit.dev/t/zig-what-i-think-after-months-of-using-...