alt Hacker News> How is that better than the Zig codebase you started with?
In contrast with the Zig codebase, you now have clear well-scoped unsafe boundaries you can iteratively fix one by one. This was not the case before.
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I would go further and say that anyone who doesn't immediately identify this either isn't thinking clearly about this, or is intentionally ignoring it. I have no horse in this race AT ALL and this is _obviously_ the advantage.
> clear well-scoped unsafe boundaries
This is not done by blindly porting Zig code 1:1 and calling it a day. You do have to make conscious decisions about code architecture to manage Unsafe code, since you need choose the right invariants for your Safe Rust code to conform inside the module (Note that unsafe pollutes the whole module containing it, not just the code inside the unsafe block!)
Except that writing safe rust often requires designing the architecture around rust's ownership model, meaning a file by file, line by line translation doesn't necessarily leave you much closer to safe rust than you were at the start.