[1]: https://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/papers/papers-we-love/... (can be spotted on page 353)

Ultimately, it's just syntax and not so important. Semantics are important.

It's like english. You don't need knowledge in obscure proto-germanic linguistics to use articles in your sentences. But if you want to understand why we seem to randomly attach "a" before nouns— proto-germanic linguistics has the answer (probably, I just speak english I don't know where all its syntax originates).

Here's a made-up JS example. I've attempted to be fair to both approaches doing it how I personally would with each.

    //typical implementation
    const howManyAdults = (data) => {
      const adults = data
        .flatMap(obj => obj.type === 'parent' ? [obj, ...obj.children] : obj)
        .filter(obj => typeof obj.age === 'number')
        .filter(obj => obj.age >= 18 && obj.age < 150)

      adults.forEach(adult =>
        console.log(`${adult.name} is an adult age ${adult.age}`)
      )

      return adults.length
    }


    //nice "point-free" implementation using helper functions
    const transformData = obj => obj.type === 'parent' ? [obj, ...obj.children] : [obj]
    const isAdult = obj => obj.age >= 18 && obj.age < 130

    const howManyAdults = pipe(
      flatMap(transformData),
      filter(hasTypeOf('age', 'number'),
      filter(isAdult),
      logEach`${pick('name')} is an adult age ${pick('age')}`,
      len,
    )


    //completely point-free gets crazy
    const howManyAdults = pipe(
      flatMap(ifElse(
        compose(eq('parent'), pick('type')), 
        juxt([identity, pick('children']),
        identity,
      ), []),
      filter(hasTypeOf('age', 'number'),
      filter(both(gte(pick('age',18), lt(pick('age'), 130)))),
      logEach`${pick('name')} is an adult age ${pick('age')}`,
      len,
    )

Personally, I rather like reading the moderate middle example because it removes the boilerplate and allows me to easily follow the overall flow without getting caught up in the details. But I'll take the first example every time if it means never dealing with the third example.

I think that's where the sentiment comes from. It's not that Rust is similar to C++ in terms of the actual languages and their features. It's that people who like C++ are morely likely to like Rust than people who like C are.

I would argue that C is not a minimalistic language either. There is a lot under the hood in C. But it feels small in a way that Rust and C++ don't.

I think Rust and C++ appeal to programmers who are OK with a large investment in wrapping their head around a big complex language with the expectation that they will be able to amortize that investment by being very productive in large projects over a large period of time. Maybe sometimes the language feels like trying to keep a piece of heavy duty machinery from killing you, but they're willing to wrestle with it for the power you get in return.

The people who are excited about Zig and C wants something that feels more like a hand tool that doesn't demand a lot of their attention and lets them focus on writing their code, even if the writing process is a little more manual labor in return.

I always thought C++ was a terrible idea, from way before C++ 98, I own Stroustrup's terrible book about his language, which I picked up at the same time as the revised K&R and it did nothing to change that belief, nor have subsequent standards.

However, I do have some sympathy for this sentiment about Rust being a better C++. Even though Rust and C++ have an entirely different approach to many important problems the syntax often looks similar and I think Zig manages to be less intimidating than Rust for that reason if you don't want that complexity.

Personally I had no interest in C++† and I have no serious interest in Zig.

† Ironically I ended up caring a lot more about C++ after I learned Rust, and most specifically when understanding how Rust's HashMap type works, but I didn't end up liking C++ I just ended up much better informed about it.

If you say "you can't do x with y in C++" you will get an "yes you can, you just use asd::dsadasd::asdadqwreqsdwerig_hfdoigbhiohrf() with weaorgoiawr flag". From what I have seen from Rust, it is similar. I don't want to fill my brain with vim bindings.. cough.. Rust ways of doing something. I just want to code my hobby game engine v7.

That said, I am happy to use software written in it. Even though the evangelists can be really annoying.

I agree with Raymond Chen's take on the academic definition of GCs[1], and therefore Rust is certainly a GC'd language (because your code behaves as though memory is infinite... usually). It's probably one of the first examples of "static garbage collection" - though I'm sure someone will point out a prior example.

[1]: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20100809-00/?p=13...

In the real world, memory safety is not all-or-nothing (unless you're willing to concede that Rust is not safe either, since unsafe Rust exists). I'm working on an embedded project in Rust and I'd MUCH rather be using Zig. The only safety thing that Rust would give me that Zig does not is protection from returning pointers to stack-allocated objects (there are no dynamic allocations and no concurrency outside of extremely simple ISRs that push events onto a statically allocated queue). But in exchange I have to deal with the presence of unsafe Rust, which feels like a gigantic minefield even compared to C.

Those are the axes relevant to the parent in the context of their comment - not specific language semantics or core features.

> The difference between Rust and basically any other popular language is that the former has memory safety without GC†. The difference between C++ and C is that the former is a large multi-paradigm language, while the latter is a minimalist language. These are completely different axes.

Indeed. Let one axis be the simple/multi paradigm. Let the other axis be no memory management / automatic memory management without GC / GC. This divides the plane into 6. In the simple + no memory management sits C and Zig, and in the multiparadigm + memory safe without GC segment sits C++ and Rust.

> There is no corresponding popular replacement for C that's more minimalist than Rust and memory safe.

Those are some weird requirements for "being a replacement", but it is obviously true, as you picked them such.

1. Rust is an immensely complicated language, and it's not very composable (see the async debacle and whatnot). On the simple<->complex slider, it's smack dab on the right of the scale.

2. Ignoring any nitpicking [0], Zig is memory-safe enough in practice, placing it much closer to Rust than to C/C++ on the memory safety axis. My teammates have been using Zig for nearly a year, and the only memory safety bug was (a) caught before prod and (b) not something Rust's features would have prevented [1]. The `defer` and `errdefer` statements are excellent, and much like how you closely audit the use of `unsafe` in Rust there is only a small subset of Zig where you actually need to pull your magnifying glass out to figure out if the code has any major issues. In terms of memory issues I've cared about (not all conforming to Rust's narrow definition of memory safety), I've personally seen many more problems in Rust projects I contribute toward (only the one in Zig, plus a misunderstanding of async as I was learning the language a few years ago, many of varying severity in Rust, at this point probably more code written in Zig than Rust, 10yoe before starting with either).

With that in mind, you have C/C++ on the unsafe axis and Zig/Rust on the safe axis. The complexity axis is self-explanatory, fleshing out the analogy.

Is Zig memory-safe? No, absolutely not. Does that mean that Rust will win out for some domains? Absolutely. In practical terms though, your average senior developer will have many memory safety bugs in C/C++ and few in Zig/Rust. It's a reasonable way to compare and contrast languages.

Is it a perfect description? No, the map is not the territory. It's an analogy that helps a lot of people understand the world around them though.

[0] Even Python is simpler than Rust, and it's memory-safe. If we're limiting ourselves to systems languages, you still have a number of options like Ada and Coq. Rust is popular because it offers a certain tradeoff in the safety/performance/devex Pareto curve, and because it's had a lot of marketing. It's unique in that niche, by definition, but it's far from the only language to offer the features you explicitly stated.

[1] It was just an object pool, and the (aggregate) resetting logic wasn't solid. The objects would have passed through the borrow checker with flying colors though.

Edit: To your GC point, many parts of Rust look closer to GC than not under the hood. You don't have a GC pause, but you have object pools (sometimes falling back to kernel object pools) and a variety of allocation data structures. If RC is a GC tactic, the extra pointer increment/decrement is negligible compared to what Rust actually does to handle its objects (RC is everything Rust does, plus a counter). That's one of my primary performance complaints with the language, that interacting with a churn of small objects is both expensive and the easiest way to code. I can't trust code I see in the wild to behave reasonably by default.

Also, there's FORTH!

There is Objective-C, it fits your definition of memory safety.

Google stopped writing new Python, because they found that the same engineers would produce software with similar defect rates, at a similar price and in similar time, with Go, but it would have markedly better performance, so, no more Python.

Go manages to have a nice sharp start, which means there are going to be a bunch of cases where you didn't need all the perf from C, but you did need a prompt start, so, Java was not an option but Go is fine.

In my own practice, Rust entirely replaces C, which has previously been my preferred language for many use cases.

C++ has tons of extra features over C because it's a kitchen sink language. Rust has some extra features over C because in order to support static analysis for memory safety in a practically usable manner, you need those features. In practice, there are lots of C++ features that Rust doesn't bother with, especially around templates. (Rust just has a more general macro feature instead. The C++ folks are now on track to adding a clunky "metaclass" feature which is a lot like Rust macros.)

I have never used zig, although I have looked into it. I have used C and C++ for a long time, and would like a replacement for C.

To my mind zig is nowhere near a good replacement for C. It adds way too much extra stuff (e.g. metaprogramming). A good replacement for C would have a similar simplicity and scope to C (i.e. a portable assembler) but address known issues. For example it should fix the operator precedence rules to be sane. It should close-off on undefined behavior and specify things more formally than C, and still allow low-level memory manipulation. To be even better than C it should allow stuff that would be obviously correct in assembler, but is UB or ID in C.

In what sense? Features or complexity? From a productivity/correctness perspective, Rust is a huge step up over C++.

TinyGo and TamaGo folks enjoy writing their bare metal applications on embedded and firmware.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42923829

Many of my favourite Rust features aren't in C++. For example they don't have real Sum types, they don't have the correct move semantic, they are statement oriented rather than expression oriented and their language lacks decent built-in tooling.

But also, some of the things C++ does have are just bad and won't get fixed/ removed because they're popular. And there's no sign of it slowing down.

I think that in practice you should use Rust in most places that C++ is used today, while some of the remainder should be WUFFS, or something entirely different.

nerdy langnoob or noobie langnerd here. not sure which is which, cuz my parsing skills are nearly zilch. ;)

Odin's "standard library" stuff is very silly, it still feels like we were just copy-pasted the lead developer's "useful stuff" directory. Bill doesn't feel there's a value to actual standard libraries, so instead here's... whatever. He insists that's not what's going on here, but that doesn't change how it feels.

But there are some: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Odin

A compiler is a function from source code strings to binary bytes. Writing out instructions to do memory-unsafe things is not in itself a memory-unsafe activity.

https://www.roc-lang.org/faq#rust-and-zig

But I'm saying there's nothing better about it than doing it in OCaml vs. C++ or Python -- it's the same or a little worse

IMW it's natural to express the interface to a lexer and parser as classes -- e.g. you peek(), eat(), lookahead(), etc.

Classes being things that control mutation

But objects in OCaml seem to be a little separate dialect: https://dev.realworldocaml.org/objects.html

When I debug a parser, I just printf the state too, and that is a little more awkward in OCaml as well. You can certainly argue it's not worse, but I have never seen anyone argue it's better.

---

Culturally, I see a lot of discussions like this, which don't really seem focused on helping people finish their parsers:

https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/why-a-handwritten-parser/7282/7

https://discuss.ocaml.org/t/good-example-of-handwritten-lexe...

I also use lexer/parser generators, and I like that there are more tools/choices available in C/Python than in OCaml.

But now it's 2025, and the new version still hasn't been enabled on stable Rust, since the Polonius implementation is seen as far too slow for larger programs. (I'm not exactly sure how horrible it really is, I haven't looked at the numbers.) A big goal of the types team since last year has been to reimplement a faster version within rustc [2].

I'd count this as a language feature (albeit a relatively minor one) that's been greatly deferred in favor of shorter compile times.

[0] https://blog.rust-lang.org/inside-rust/2023/10/06/polonius-u...

[1] https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/51133

[2] https://rust-lang.github.io/rust-project-goals/2024h2/Poloni...

There are probably some risks to it. And I think that you wouldn’t want to release a Roc v1 before Zig v1 as well.

But if things are working well now, you could always stay on an older version of Zig while you rewrite things for breaking changes in a newer version.

Still potentially a pain, but Rust is post v1 and they ended up deciding to rewrite anyway, so there are no guarantees in any approach.

Falsified many times during Rust's development.

Dog-fooding is important, but it can be done outside of compiler development. If the only code the compiler team writes is the compiler, they end up designing a language that's great for implementing compilers at the expense of other use cases.

sweet@nadeko ~ $ mkcd test

sweet@nadeko ~/test $ zig init

info: created build.zig

info: created build.zig.zon

info: created src/main.zig

info: created src/root.zig

info: see `zig build --help` for a menu of options

sweet@nadeko ~/test $ time zig build

zig build 5.08s user 0.58s system 119% cpu 4.745 total

# cached

sweet@nadeko ~/test $ time zig build

zig build 0.01s user 0.03s system 132% cpu 0.026 total

# after rewriting the main function to call a function that takes a pointer to another function

sweet@nadeko ~/test $ time zig build

zig build 0.02s user 0.03s system 136% cpu 0.032 total

```