MAmatklad·Oct 25, 2025
I strongly agree with your statement overall, but not in details.
Regarding string manipulation, Zig has slices and comptime-checked `printf`, so that makes string handling _massively_ more ergonomic than in C. But, yeah, managing the lifetime of the printf-ed is a pain in the back, and Rust is _massively_ more ergonomic there, if managing individual string allocations is what you want to do. (though one cool thing that Zig makes easy is comptime asserting that stack-allocated buffer has the right size for the given format string).
But, I do find Zig surprisingly ergonomic overall! For example, I have two Rust crate for writing glue code utilities, xflags (argument parsing) and xshell (shelling out). For TigerBeetle, I wrote equivalents:
* https://github.com/tigerbeetle/tigerbeetle/blob/main/src/std...
* https://github.com/tigerbeetle/tig
Read the rest
erbeetle/blob/main/src/she...
What I found is that the Zig version is significantly easier to implement and to use, for me. In Rust, those domains require macros, but in Zig it's all comptime. And memory management is relatively easy --- flags live until the end of the program, shell is just using shell-scoped arena. I am contemplating rewriting my personal scripts at https://github.com/matklad/config/tree/master/tools/gg to Zig for that reason. Though, Zig not being 1.0 _is_ a problem in that context --- I touch my scripts only rarely, and I don't want to be on the hook for upgrades.