alt Hacker NewsThat's a very narrow way of looking at things. ATS has a much stronger "deterministic safety net" than Rust, yet the reason to use Rust over ATS is that "fighting the compiler" is easier in Rust than in ATS. On the other hand, if any cost is worth whatever level of safety Rust offers for any project, than Rust wouldn't exist because there are far more popular languages with equal (or better) safety. So Rust's design itself is an admission that 1. more compile-time safety is always better, even if it complicates the language (or everyone who uses Rust should use ATS), and 2. any cost is worth paying for safety (or Rust wouldn't exist in the first place).
Safety has some value that isn't infinite, and a cost that isn't zero. There are also different kinds of safety with different value and different costs. For example, spatial memory safety appears to have more value than temporal safety (https://cwe.mitre.org/top25/archive/2025/2025_cwe_top25.html) and Zig offers spatial safety. The question is always what you're paying and what you're getting in return. There doesn't appear to be a universal right answer. For some projects it may be worth it to pay for more safety, and for other it may be better to pay for something else.
Replies
You’re changing the argument. The point wasn’t whether more safety is “worth it”, but that comparing ease while ignoring which invariants are enforced is misleading. Zig can feel simpler because it encodes fewer guarantees. I’m not saying one approach is better, only that this comparison shifts the goalposts.
> 1. more compile-time safety is always better, even if it complicates the language (or everyone who uses Rust should use ATS), and 2. any cost is worth paying for safety (or Rust wouldn't exist in the first place).
You keep repeating this. It's not true. If what you said was true, Rust would have adopted HKT, and God knows whatever type astronomy Haskell & Scala cooked up.
There is a balancing act, and Rust decided to plant a flag in memory safety without GC. The fact that Zig, didn't expand on this, but went backwards is more of an indictment of programmers unwilling to adapt and perfect what came before, but to reinvent it in their own worse way.
> There are also different kinds of safety with different value and different costs. For example, spatial memory safety appears to have more value than temporal safety (https://cwe.mitre.org/top25/archive/2025/2025_cwe_top25.html)
How did you derive this from the top 25 of CWEs? Let's say you completely remove the spatial memory issues. You still get temporal memory issues at #6.
Imo "safety" in safe Rust is higher than it is in more popular languages.
Data races, type state pattern, lack of nulls, ...