Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Rust VS Zig

Compare Rust VS Zig and see what are their differences

Rust logo Rust

A safe, concurrent, practical language

Zig logo Zig

Zig is a general-purpose programming language designed for robustness, optimality, and maintainability.
  • Rust Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-05-09

We recommend LibHunt Rust for discovery and comparisons of trending Rust projects.

  • Zig Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-08-19

We recommend LibHunt Zig for discovery and comparisons of trending Zig projects.

Rust features and specs

  • Memory Safety
    Rust’s ownership system guarantees memory safety without a garbage collector, preventing common bugs such as null pointer dereferencing, buffer overflows, and data races.
  • Performance
    Rust aims to provide memory safety while maintaining high performance. It is often as fast as C and C++ due to zero-cost abstractions.
  • Concurrency
    Rust's ownership and type system make it easier to write safe concurrent code, helping developers avoid concurrency issues.
  • Tooling
    Rust has excellent tooling, including the Cargo package manager and build system, and Rustfmt for code formatting.
  • Community and Ecosystem
    Rust has a growing community and ecosystem, with active contributions and a wide range of libraries and frameworks available.
  • Strong Typing and Error Handling
    Rust’s type system and pattern matching compel developers to handle errors and edge cases, leading to more robust and predictable code.

Possible disadvantages of Rust

  • Learning Curve
    Rust’s advanced features such as its ownership system and lifetimes can be difficult for beginners to grasp, making it harder to learn compared to some other languages.
  • Compilation Time
    Rust can have longer compilation times, especially for large codebases, which can slow down the development process.
  • Ecosystem Maturity
    Although growing, Rust's ecosystem is not yet as mature as those of more established languages like JavaScript, Python, or even C++, leading to fewer available libraries and frameworks for certain tasks.
  • Complexity of Code
    The strictness of Rust's borrow checker can lead to more complex and verbose code as developers explicitly manage ownership and lifetimes.
  • Tool and Library Development
    Despite the rapid growth, some tools and libraries are still under development or lack the polish of their counterparts in more mature languages.

Zig features and specs

  • Performance
    Zig aims to offer high performance comparable to C or C++, allowing it to be suitable for system-level programming.
  • Safety
    It includes modern safety features like optional type checking, bounds checking, and panic handling without a garbage collector.
  • Interoperability
    Zig has excellent interoperability with C, including the ability to directly include C headers and compile C code.
  • Build System
    Zig comes with an integrated build system that simplifies project configuration and management.
  • Cross-compilation
    The language has built-in support for cross-compilation, making it easier to develop for different target environments.
  • Simplicity
    Zig aims for simplicity and explicitness in its design, making code easy to read and understand.

Possible disadvantages of Zig

  • Maturity
    Zig is still relatively new and under active development, which means it may not yet have as many libraries or tools as more established languages.
  • Community
    The community is growing but still small compared to languages like C, C++, or Rust, which may make finding resources or support more challenging.
  • Learning Curve
    Newcomers to system programming or those used to managed languages might find Zig's low-level features and manual memory management challenging.
  • Ecosystem
    While growing, Zig does not yet have as rich an ecosystem of third-party libraries and frameworks as more established languages.
  • Documentation
    Though improving, the documentation is not as comprehensive as more mature languages, which can slow down the learning and development process.

Rust videos

Rust Crash Course | Rustlang

More videos:

  • Review - Why You Should & Shouldn't Learn the Rust Programming Language
  • Review - All About Rust

Zig videos

UNHYPE: CRAZY COLLAB Braindead x REEBOK ZIG Kinetica II REVIEW

More videos:

  • Review - Reebok ZIG Kinetica REVIEW [Conor McGregor Shoes] - Durable Everyday Training Sneakers
  • Review - Zig Dynamica - Full Review

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Rust and Zig)
Programming Language
55 55%
45% 45
OOP
52 52%
48% 48
Generic Programming Language
Learning Resources
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Rust and Zig

Rust Reviews

Top 5 Most Liked and Hated Programming Languages of 2022
A survey by Stack Overflow reveals that about 83.5% of 90000 developers loved Rust and tagged it to be the most adorable programming language. Rust is that general-purpose programming language that mainly caters to excellent performance and safety. This multi-worldview programming language has syntax similar to that of C++.
Top 10 Rust Alternatives
Several programming languages like Rust are among the popular ones. However, people are in search of some good alternatives to Rust. Therefore, today we will be talking more about the top 10 alternatives to Rust.
The 10 Best Programming Languages to Learn Today
Rust is a fairly advanced language, so you'll want to master another language or two before learning Rust. But you'll find that learning Rust pays off generously. The average salary for a Rust developer in the U.S. is $105,000 per year.
Source: ict.gov.ge

Zig Reviews

We have no reviews of Zig yet.
Be the first one to post

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Zig should be more popular than Rust. It has been mentiond 155 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Rust mentions (48)

  • Useful Clippy lints
    Hello! Rust has very useful tool, named Cargo. It helps you compile code, run program, run tests and benches, format code using cargo fmt and lint it using clippy. In this post we'll talk abou Clippy. - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago
  • Minimalist blog with Zola, AWS CDK, and Tailwind CSS - Part 1
    What are we going to do today? We're going to build a minimalist blog using Zola (built with Rust, btw), AWS CDK, Tailwind CSS, and a tiny bit of Typescript. - Source: dev.to / 2 months ago
  • This Tool can remove 98% Bloatware apps
    Effortlessly remove up to 98% of bloatware apps from your Android device without needing root access. Developed in Rust for efficiency and reliability. - Source: dev.to / 5 months ago
  • What Language Should I Choose?
    One language that really gave me that feeling was Gleam, it managed to wrap everything I liked about languages such as JS, Rust and even Java into one brilliant type-safe package. Not for a long time before I met Gleam had I wanted to try creating so many different things just to get to the bottom of how this language ticked, as it were. - Source: dev.to / 7 months ago
  • Learning Rust: Enumerating Excellence
    Let's dive back into Rust! This time we're going to be going through the lesson called "Enums and Pattern Matching". We're going to be looking at inferring meaning with our data, how we can use match to execute different code depending on input and finally we'll have a look at if let. - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
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Zig mentions (155)

  • RawWeb Updates: SimHash and Meilisearch
    For local testing, just run cargo build --release. But cross-platform compilation is much more complicated. Fortunately, the Zig toolchain greatly simplifies C cross-compilation, eliminating the need for musl libc! - Source: dev.to / 7 days ago
  • F8 – an 8 bit architecture designed for C and memory efficiency [video]
    Https://ziglang.org/ is a solid future C-replacement, IMHO. There's pretty much no downsides and all upsides from a C hacker's perspective. It just hasn't reached 1.0 yet! - Source: Hacker News / 2 months ago
  • Rust Kernel Policy
    But the situation for Rust-C++ interop is also worse than for Rust-C interop. Why else would Google spend maybe $1 million on improving it in 2024? https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/05/google_rust_donation/ Many years after Rust got support in Mozilla for usage with Firefox written in C++. >My sibling is also correct, language decisions were made in order to keep FFI zero overhead. Yet overhead is only one piece... - Source: Hacker News / 3 months ago
  • Ask HN: What are some software projects with impressive websites?
    I am looking for some inspiration at websites for software projects that do a very good of job explaining their product right from the get go. Things like programming language or database home pages/docs or open source projects with good git READMEs. Though I've never used it, I think https://ziglang.org/ is a great example as it explains what makes the language unique, gives a code example right at the beginning,... - Source: Hacker News / 3 months ago
  • TIL: Ghostty — a new and quite promising terminal emulator
    At the same time, in the internal Slack of the company I work for, my colleague asked the security team whether we have any policies about the apps, as they'd like to start using Ghostty as their terminal emulator. I took a look at it, and it immediately caught my attention: a fresh look, a zero-config setup, platform-native UI (discovered in details in the “Ghostty Is Native—So What?” post by Gregory Anders) and... - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Rust and Zig, you can also consider the following products

Python - Python is a clear and powerful object-oriented programming language, comparable to Perl, Ruby, Scheme, or Java.

Nim (programming language) - The Nim programming language is a concise, fast programming language that compiles to C, C++ and JavaScript.

Java - A concurrent, class-based, object-oriented, language specifically designed to have as few implementation dependencies as possible

V (programming language) - Simple, fast, safe, compiled language for developing maintainable software.

JavaScript - Lightweight, interpreted, object-oriented language with first-class functions

D (Programming Language) - D is a language with C-like syntax and static typing.