alt Hacker NewsAs a C++ developer, my experience with learning both Rust and Zig is that they're both good languages, and any reasonably skilled C++ developer could learn either language if they put their mind to it.
If you forced me to pick between Zig and Rust for a long-running project though, I'd pick Rust 10/10 times for the simple fact that it has been stable for more than a decade and already has momentum and funding behind it. Zig is a cool language - one that I've actually written more of than Rust - but it hasn't hit 1.0 yet and still has significant churn in both the language and standard library.
My point is this:
Rust is complex.
That is not a statement anyone can deny. Unless you're a Rust-bro "hey man I learned it so I’m baffled how you can't see it's super simple ..... etc etc" - often the implication that you're not very smart if you think Rust is complex.
Of everything that I have learned about programming, this is the BIGGEST lesson: - complexity is bad, avoid complexity. Complex is not the same as "sophisticated", which implies necessary intricacy. Complex means unneeded unnecessary cognitive load - things made harder than they should be when it could have been avoided - that's complexity. If you are writing complex code then you're writing bad code. And Rust is complex.
It is sad that we did not end up with a SIMPLE programming language that solves the memory safety problem.
What we needed was Rust-- i.e Rust without all the non-safety related extras that make it different - it's all the non-safety add ons that makes Rust into a Rube Goldberg machine.