> As an aside, I don't know why anyone would not want to use a memory-safe (and possibly race-safe) language in 2026.

The rust compiler is very slow. The best way to speed it up appears to be organizing a codebase in many crates. This is not preferable ergonomics to many. Beside that, for many problems, a garbage collector eliminates a large amount of defects (including the ones stated in the article) without any added friction, whereas Rust asks that you think in terms of ownership. This is not preferable ergonomics to many.

I realize what I'm saying above, while true, doesn't give a clear example. Many gamedevs would rather iterate with a language that is lower friction, not only because game code is finnicky (like frontend UI code) but because the build process can be unique. Many gamedevs prefer to iterate with hot-reloading, and asking them to use a slower compiler is asking them to accept greater latency in that cycle.

I do not claim that these reasons apply to everyone.

> I can understand when you need the absolute best performance and you decide to drop to down to C++

Rust is just as fast as C++.

that you understand and think dropping down to C++ is what you need to do when you "need the best performance" is quite enough of a tell to invalidate the rest of your opinion here. if you "need the best performance", you need to ditch OOP and RAII, and you're probably reaching for C. Zig wants to be the better choice there. that's a perfectly reasonable niche for a language to exist in.

if you read the article carefully, jarred is pretty clear about how their specific requirements with Bun cause friction when bridging the manual memory management of Zig with a garbage collected JS runtime. at face value, that makes quite a lot of sense to me, and it's a pretty specific scenario that is not the full on condemnation of memory unsafe languages that your comment is.

My personal memory and concurrent-safe option is Swift. And I agree, choosing a non-memory safe language for a new project is close to irresponsible today…

I've observed that dumber models are able to vibecode in safe languages a lot easier since the compiler errors can self correct the models hallucinations, while they end up marking a task as complete in dynamic languages despite it not actually working.

If I'm vibe coding something I'm always just going to do it in Rust.

I'll bite. The first language I could "just write" in was C. I had internalised the language and its standard lib and didn't need the internet to work with it.

Rust is pushed by many as the replacement to C, because of the memory safety guarantees. I'm sympathetic. I worked with Haskell for a time, so I get it. But Rust seems quite complex. There are so many language features that there's memes about it. There's also the friction and learning curve.

So, for fun, I choose zig because, like C, I can hold most of the language in my head and "just write." I choose zig because it does a great deal to help me write correct and highly performant code. I can use arena allocators and defer and cure my code of many memory issues. Then there's the various language rules around pointers (optionals, slices, etc) that help me write correct code. There's the built in testing and the test allocator. I love that comptime and the build system are not special cases, but rather are just garden variety zig. I love the simplicity and elegance of it all.

I also choose zig because I prefer the liberty it affords me. I am responsible for each and every allocation. It appeals to my libertarian sensiblities.

rust is still a non starter in some niche embedded applications (way too big). i still write c and assembly constantly.