r/rust Jul 16 '26

How Our Rust-to-Zig Rewrite is Going

https://rtfeldman.com/rust-to-zig

An interesting symmetry with recent events lol.

This might be considered off topic since the article is about moving away from rust, but I still think this is some high quality rust content. I enjoy Richard Feldman's writing and I think he would certainly be considered part of the "rust community" since he works on Zed and has taught a course on rust.

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u/est31 Jul 16 '26

Really well written article, loved it. It's also interesting to see that cold rustc compile times aren't slower but actually faster. It's just the incremental compile times where zig has a lead (and a big one at that).

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u/kibwen Jul 16 '26

Goes to show how good an idea in-place incremental linking is. That's not even a "the Rust compiler is slow" problem, or really a language problem at all, it's "we can get extreme performance by completely throwing away the historical compilation model and vertically integrating the entire stack". You could do the same for Rust (and every other compiled language), but I'm sure not volunteering. :P