Zig gives things we really dont have yet: C + generics + good const eval + good build system + easy cross compilation + modern niceties (optionals, errors, sum types, slices, vectors, arbitrary bit packing, expression freedom).
Are there any other languages that provide this? Would genuinely consider the switch for some stuff if so.
There are places a language could be a better fit, but which haven't adopted it. E.g. most languages over typescript on the backend, most systems programming languages over Java for games.
Yes, I've written a few unsafe-focused crates [0], some of which have been modified & merged into the stdlib [1] [2] exposing them to the fringe edge-cases of Rust like strict provenance.
IMO, Rust is good for modeling static constraints - ideal when there's multiple teams of varying skill trying to work on the same codebase, as the contracts for components are a lot clearer. Zig is good for expressing system-level constructs efficiently: doing stuff like self-referential/intrusive data structures, cross-platform simd, and memory transformations is a lot easier in Zig than Rust.
I've worked on two "production" zig codebases: tigerbeetle [0] and sig [1].
These larger zig projects will stick to a tagged release (which doesn't change), and upgrade to newly tagged releases, usually a few days or months after they come out. The upgrade itself takes like a week, depending on the amount of changes to be done. These projects also tend to not use other zig dependencies.
> so you have no clue if the shared data might be incompletely modified or otherwise logically corrupted.
One can make a panic wrapper type if they cared: It's what the stdlib Mutex currently does:
MutexGuard checks if its panicking during drop using `std::thread::panicking()`, and if so, sets a bool on the Mutex. The next acquirer checks for that bool & knows state may be corrupted. No need to bake this into the Mutex itself.
There's compiler-level traits like `Iterator` and `Future` which enforce references. If wanting to do intrusive pointers into them, one risks creating overlapping references: https://github.com/tokio-rs/tokio/issues/3399
Are there any other languages that provide this? Would genuinely consider the switch for some stuff if so.