Rust & Zig Combined • Richard Feldman • GOTO 2023

Rust

Learn how to combine the safety of Rust with the simplicity of Zig to achieve the best of both worlds in programming languages, discusses trade-offs and optimizations for performance and memory safety.

Key takeaways

Rust and Zig combined can offer a balance between safety and performance.
Rust’s strong guarantees around memory safety are valuable, but its complexity and learning curve can be a barrier.
Zig’s simplicity and ease of use make it a more accessible option, but it lacks Rust’s guarantees.
Combining Rust and Zig can allow for the best of both worlds: Rust’s safety guarantees and Zig’s simplicity.
Manual LLVM calls can be verbose and error-prone, making it difficult to achieve high-level abstractions.
The unsafe keyword in Rust can introduce memory unsafety, but it’s not a guarantee of unsafety.
Memory safety is a critical concern, and languages like Rust and Zig are addressing it through various mechanisms.
The author’s experience with Rust and Zig suggests that a combined approach can be beneficial.
The trade-offs between safety, performance, and complexity should be carefully considered when choosing a programming language.
Rust’s borrow checker and lifetime annotations can be helpful in ensuring memory safety.
Zig’s testing allocator can help detect and prevent memory unsafety.
The author’s experience with memory unsafety bugs in C-style code highlights the importance of language design in preventing such issues.
Arena allocation and CPU memory caches can be important considerations in optimizing performance.
The defer keyword in Rust can help ensure that resources are released correctly.
The author’s journey with programming began with basic languages like JavaScript and eventually led to Rust and Zig.
The author’s experience with concurrency and parallelism in Rust and Zig suggests that these languages can be well-suited for high-performance applications.
The author’s use of LLVM to compile Rust and Zig code highlights the importance of optimizing performance.
The author’s discussion of the trade-offs between safety, performance, and complexity suggests that there is no one-size-fits-all solution.

Rust & Zig Combined • Richard Feldman • GOTO 2023

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