alt Hacker News> 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.
Rust does have a GC, but I agree it planted its flag at some intermediate point on the spectrum. Zig didn't "go backwards" but planted its own flag ever so slightly closer to C than to ATS (although both Rust and Zig are almost indistinguishable from C when compare to ATS). I don't know if where Rust planted its flag is universally better than where Zig planted its flag, but 1. no one else does either, 2. both are compromises, and 3. it's uncertain whether a universal sweet spot exists in the first place.
> 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.
Sure, but spatial safety is higher. So if Rust's compromise, we'll exact a price on temporal safety and have both temporal and spatial safety, is reasonable, then so is Zig's that says, the price on temporal safety is too high for what you get in return, but spatial safety only is a better deal. Neither go as far as ATS in offering, in principle, the ability to avoid all bugs. Nobody knows whether Rust's compormise is universally better than Zig's or vice versa (or perhaps neither is universally better), but I find it really strange to arbitrarily claim that one compromise is reasonable and the other isn't, where both are obviously compromises that recognise there are different benefits and different costs, and that not every benefit is worth any cost.