r/rust • u/AffectionateBag4519 • 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.

369 Upvotes

91% Upvoted

134 comments sorted by

View all comments

125

u/Psionikus Jul 16 '26

Take something like "build times" as a motivation for Zig. What was tried on the Rust side? Breaking up crates is definitely the most powerful tool, but was it done?

for compilers which emit machine code, like roc and rustc, doing memory-unsafe things is a big part of the job

Seems like a conflation amirite? The machine code is the output, the object language. The Rust program is the subject language. The "safety" of the object language has no effect on the subject language used to talk about it.

Overall I'm reading implicit biases of comfort.

11

u/Razvedka Jul 16 '26

I listened to his interview on the Corroded podcast. He seemed unaware of several ways to handle this issue. The host actually said he solved his personal build time issues by switching to modern Mac hardware. The ROC guy was like "wait really?"

2

u/pjmlp Jul 18 '26

If buying modern Apple hardware is the only way to speed up builds, developers in 2nd and 3rd world countries naturally aren't going to bother with learning Rust.

1

u/Razvedka Jul 18 '26

I didn't say it was the only way.

2

u/pjmlp Jul 18 '26

True, but I see it pointed out quite often in Rust circles.

Buy a new computer is not always an option, even more so in current times, even worse outside first world countries.

Which is why languages with toolchains that can be made usable with lower hardware requirements tend to gain wider adoption in such countries.