alt Hacker NewsYeah, but argumenting that "Bun codebase is a mess" is anti-Zig in itself.
The whole point of the borrow checker is to make it impossible to write wrong code. If Zig accepts bad code, but assumes people will have self-discipline to maintain it, how is that different from C?
C assumes good discipline, as well as C++. But it will happily accept bad code. So I'm not even sure what Zig is even improving on.
Rust was designed to answer this exact problem (among a few others of course).
So the argument "your code is fscking sheet" is very 1990's. In 2026 we need guarantees that we can't produce invalid code.
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The borrow checker is a good tool (and it makes Rust objectively better than Zig to me), but it unfortunately doesn't prevent writing bad code
An issue with Bun is that it interfaces with a C++ JS engine and it needs unsafe. In this case, the best practice is to write a safe binding to encapsulate this external dependency (that's why in Rust we have -sys crates with raw unsafe bindings, and other crates with a safe interface on top), and then write your business logic entirely in safe Rust
However, the Rust port of Bun didn't follow such best practices (perhaps with good SDD practices it could, not sure about that). The resulting code has literally thousands of unsafe blocks. It also contains plenty of UB. The port already costed hundreds of thousands of dollars. It's unclear if Mythos/Fable is able to refactor it further to remove unsafe usage without introducing further UB, and how much it will cost
(here It's important to note something. Rust UB is in some abstract sense harder to deal with than C or Zig UB, because it also needs to uphold the guarantees of safe Rust. If you get to write your business logic in safe Rust that's a good deal, but the price of that is that your unsafe code has extra responsibilities)
Static memory safety is a spectrum and so is code quality.
> how is that different from C?
Zig gives you far more memory and type safety than C and without a borrow checker and a complex generics system.
Zig also allows optional runtime checks (at the cost of runtime performance).
There is no better language between Rust and Zig because they have different tradeoffs that are better or worse in different scenarios. It is more like Rust vs C++ and Zig vs C.
Rust requires discipline too. I can go around using Arc, Rc and .clone() everywhere without upsetting the borrow checker, I can use let mut a bunch and pretend if, match, etc. aren't expressions. This results in worse code, and Rust didn't stop me.
The borrow checker prevents a set of errors from being possible, but it doesn't prevent bad code from being written.
Most bugs are logic bugs which rust does nothing to help you with.
> The whole point of the borrow checker is to make it impossible to write wrong code.
> In 2026 we need guarantees that we can't produce invalid code.
Rust doesn't provide either of those guarantees.
If I were to rephrase your sentiment for accuracy: Rust disallows certain coding patterns. Certain classes of bugs can only appear in those coding patterns.
IOW, Rust disallows $FOO which is a superset of "specific class of errors". This means that while Rust prevents specific bugs, as a side-effect it will also prevent some correct code.