I'm curious to see how Zig approaches the hard problems and hopeful it produces something remarkable enough to make me jump ship (like Rust has for some of my projects).
I'm not trying to change your mind either; I'm just trying to understand the enthusiasm around Zig. There's a lot of it! To this day, I still don’t see what hard problems it would help me solve (that other languages make solving easier). At least for me, there’s little novelty or technical intrigue in that sense for any "systems" problem I've worked on.
- Explicit use of allocators: In my experience, hidden allocations rarely cause memory leaks. The real issues are forgetting to free memory, freeing the wrong pointer or managing overlapping objects. Some systems I’ve worked on also use different allocators or representations for the same types (e.g., for succinct encoding). Stronger type systems and optional automatic memory management make life easier when available.
- Arenas: malloc and free are as first-class as any other allocation mechanism in C. In C++, using alternative allocator types takes a bit more finesse. It’s an opt-in model rather than the default but still a relatively light lift.
- defer: I agree that its use would be significantly reduced but it’s easy to opt into. Many languages provide similar functionality either natively or through libraries, including Rust, C++, Python, C#, Java, D and Swift. Even C has this through GNU extensions (for fun, check out how far the Linux kernel takes this concept).
- Pointers: I love pointers but what helps performance more is explicit typing, stronger provenance and alias analysis.
While I'm not specifically advocating for Rust here, I don’t believe the average safety or correctness of a Zig program will match that of Rust. Rust is memory-safe by design, whereas Zig is not, and Rust also provides elegant solutions to several genuinely hard problems from memory management to events to scalable concurrency and an expressive type system.
Thanks for the response. I look forward to seeing how the type system evolves.
- No hidden allocations: Other languages already provide abstractions for this. Are hidden allocations really a significant issue in modern systems languages, even when managing memory manually? This concern is distinct from memory leaks or general memory safety problems.
- Allocators: It's easy to use an arena in C++ or C.
- defer keyword: Similar constructs have existed in other languages and even as a GNU C extension for many years.
- Bounds checking: Not an issue in Rust. The real source of risk has always been raw pointer manipulation, which Zig doesn't (cannot?) solve. How is it better than address sanitizer? Rust solves this at the language level.
- Nullability: GCC has long supported non-null attributes and unused-result annotations and Clang provides _Nullable. C++ goes further with type-level guarantees via std::optional, gsl::not_null and related abstractions.
- Errors: Zig’s approach is clean but equivalent mechanisms exist in C++ (std::expected) and Rust (Result and error types). It’s mainly cumbersome in plain C.
All of these are useful quality-of-life improvements but they don’t address my problems in systems programming (such as efficient and composable data structures, data movement, scalable concurrency, safe memory management ...and boiler-plate, lots of boiler-plate). These problems are easier to solve with a type system that allows me to make strong correctness guarantees and extend those guarantees.
Lastly, I’m unsure that any potential boilerplate reduction would be significant if implemented in Zig.
I don't know. I don’t doubt that TigerBeetle’s hardest correctness challenges can’t be solved by language alone. TigerBeetle has impressive guarantees! Those are inherently systems-design problems.
But the language defines the failure surface and the cost of getting those systems problems right. Likewise, the difficulty and performance of implementing correctness mechanisms (lock-free data structures, concurrent logs or safe async I/O) are directly shaped by the language’s semantics and toolchain.
So while I agree end-to-end correctness is a systems-design problem, the language choice determines how much of that correctness is enforceable, how much is manual and how hard it is to make the right design fast and reliable.
It's a bit of both! I’d love feedback from someone more experienced with Zig, especially if there’s any flaw in my reasoning here.
The programming language is part of the system design. The abstractions, invariants and guarantees the language provides define what classes of bugs are even possible to have. For example, Rust’s ownership and lifetime semantics eliminate entire categories of memory and concurrency errors that would otherwise surface as “system-design” issues in C or Zig.
When you say “power to weight ratio”, could you elaborate on how that applies relative to C++ in the context of TigerBeetle? You mentioned io_uring support being added. What makes Zig uniquely suited for that compared to a more mature language like C++, which already offers a concurrency model and a sophisticated type system you can selectively use?
You also mentioned prefetch support. That's a lot easier to implement in other languages. I’m curious what specifically made Zig the better fit for these optimizations in your experience.
I appreciate you taking the time to respond to my question.
How is Zig considered “90% safe”? It relies on manual memory management, its simple type system provides limited compile-time guarantees and it lacks a mature concurrency model (making safe parallelism difficult). Given these gaps, I struggle to see how Zig achieves a consistently high level of safety. It seems no safer than using AddressSanitizer at best?
jorangreef: Could you elaborate on what aspects of Zig made it the preferred choice for TigerBeetle compared to C++? I understand the C type system has limitations.
I’m particularly interested as I’ve encountered similar challenges with intrusive data structures in my own work.
This isn’t intended as flamebait. I’m trying to understand Zig’s long-term positioning and design philosophy. I have serious confusion about the type of problems Zig is aiming to solve. In my view, Zig is not solving the actual hard problems in systems programming and it doesn't have the foundation to either.
Memory safety? Still entirely manual. Race conditions? Nothing in the language prevents them. There’s no ownership model, no lifetime analysis, no way to tie resource management to the type system. Compare that to Rust’s borrow checker or modern C++’s RAII and concepts. Zig’s type system is shallow. comptime is nice for generating code, but it doesn’t give you formal guarantees or expressive power for invariants, safety, or correctness.
The type system itself has no serious formal grounding. It can’t encode complex invariants, can’t track aliasing, can’t enforce concurrency safety and can’t model safe resource lifetimes. These aren’t academic extras — they’re exactly what decades of research in programming languages, operating systems and concurrent computing tell us you need to scale safety and correctness. Zig ignores them. Performance? When the policy is in the type (allocator choice, borrowing/ownership, fusion shape), Rust/C++ compilers can specialize, inline, and eliminate overhead. In Zig, the same policies are usually runtime values or conventions, which means more indirect calls, more defensive copies and fewer whole-program optimizations.
Concurrency is another major gap and in a real systems language, it cannot be an afterthought. Even if Zig isn’t currently aiming to solve concurrency or safety, a “serious” systems language inevitably has to, because these are the problems that determine scalability, maintainability and security over decades. The async model in Zig is little more than manual coroutine lowering: the compiler rewrites your function into a state machine and leaves correctness entirely to the programmer. There’s no structured concurrency, no safe cancellation, no prevention of shared-state hazards. Without a concurrency model that integrates into the type system, you can’t make guarantees about thread safety or race freedom and you end up relying entirely on discipline (which doesn’t scale).
Even in its most-touted features, Zig seems to be solving syntactic sugar problems, not the important systems problems. defer and errdefer? They’re effectively cleaner syntax for patterns C has had for decades through GNU’s __attribute__((cleanup)) or macro-based scope guards. Error unions? A nice alternative to out-parameters but just syntactic polish over an old idea. comptime? A more integrated macro system but still aimed at reducing boilerplate rather than providing deeper correctness guarantees.
The allocator interface? Another missed opportunity. Zig could have made it type-aware, preventing allocator misuse and catching entire classes of errors at compile time. Instead, it’s basically malloc/free with slightly cleaner function signatures. No safety net, no policy enforcement.
Zig discards decades of research in type systems, concurrency models, safety guarantees, and memory management, then reimplements C with a few ergonomic wins and leaves the hard problems untouched. It’s a restart without the research and not systems language evolution.
I am not a Rust fanatic but by contrast if you’re moving away from C++ or C, Rust actually tackles the big issues. It enforces memory safety without a garbage collector, prevents data races in safe code through its ownership and type system, offers structured concurrency with async/await and has been battle-tested in production for everything from browser engines to operating systems to databases. It is built on decades of progress and integrates those lessons into a language designed to scale correctness and performance together.
In my own code (primarily C++ and Rust), Zig wouldn’t solve a single core problem I face. Memory safety would still be my responsibility, concurrency would still be entirely manual, performance tuning would remain just as challenging and the type system wouldn’t catch the subtle bugs that matter most. The net result would be cosmetic changes paired with fewer correctness guarantees. Even C, for all its flaws, is better defined than Zig (both in having a detailed, standardized specification and in benefiting from partial formalization).
I am eager and optimistic that Zig starts taking itself seriously as a systems language. With new talent, deeper engagement with existing research and a focus on solving the actual hard problems, not just smoothing over C’s syntax, Zig could grow into something much more than it is today. But until then, the question remains: what problems is Zig actually solving that make it worth adopting over Rust or even modern C++? What concrete systems programming problems has Zig’s development team personally run into that shaped its design and are those really the most critical issues worth addressing in a new systems language?
If all it offers is nicer syntax over the same old pitfalls, I don’t see it and I don’t see why anyone betting on long-term systems software should.
This isn’t intended as flamebait. I’m trying to understand Zig’s long-term positioning and design philosophy. I have serious confusion about the type of problems Zig is aiming to solve. In my view, Zig is not solving the actual hard problems in systems programming and it doesn't have the foundation to either.
Memory safety? Still entirely manual. Race conditions? Nothing in the language prevents them. There’s no ownership model, no lifetime analysis, no way to tie resource management to the type system. Compare that to Rust’s borrow checker or modern C++’s RAII and concepts. Zig’s type system is shallow. comptime is nice for generating code, but it doesn’t give you formal guarantees or expressive power for invariants, safety, or correctness.
The type system itself has no serious formal grounding. It can’t encode complex invariants, can’t track aliasing, can’t enforce concurrency safety and can’t model safe resource lifetimes. These aren’t academic extras — they’re exactly what decades of research in programming languages, operating systems and concurrent computing tell us you need to scale safety and correctness. Zig ignores them. Performance? When the policy is in the type (allocator choice, borrowing/ownership, fusion shape), Rust/C++ compilers can specialize, inline, and eliminate overhead. In Zig, the same policies are usually runtime values or conventions, which means more indirect calls, more defensive copies and fewer whole-program optimizations.
Concurrency is another major gap and in a real systems language, it cannot be an afterthought. Even if Zig isn’t currently aiming to solve concurrency or safety, a “serious” systems language inevitably has to, because these are the problems that determine scalability, maintainability and security over decades. The async model in Zig is little more than manual coroutine lowering: the compiler rewrites your function into a state machine and leaves correctness entirely to the programmer. There’s no structured concurrency, no safe cancellation, no prevention of shared-state hazards. Without a concurrency model that integrates into the type system, you can’t make guarantees about thread safety or race freedom and you end up relying entirely on discipline (which doesn’t scale).
Even in its most-touted features, Zig seems to be solving syntactic sugar problems, not the important systems problems. defer and errdefer? They’re effectively cleaner syntax for patterns C has had for decades through GNU’s __attribute__((cleanup)) or macro-based scope guards. Error unions? A nice alternative to out-parameters but just syntactic polish over an old idea. comptime? A more integrated macro system but still aimed at reducing boilerplate rather than providing deeper correctness guarantees.
The allocator interface? Another missed opportunity. Zig could have made it type-aware, preventing allocator misuse and catching entire classes of errors at compile time. Instead, it’s basically malloc/free with slightly cleaner function signatures. No safety net, no policy enforcement.
Zig discards decades of research in type systems, concurrency models, safety guarantees, and memory management, then reimplements C with a few ergonomic wins and leaves the hard problems untouched. It’s a restart without the research and not systems language evolution.
I am not a Rust fanatic but by contrast if you’re moving away from C++ or C, Rust actually tackles the big issues. It enforces memory safety without a garbage collector, prevents data races in safe code through its ownership and type system, offers structured concurrency with async/await and has been battle-tested in production for everything from browser engines to operating systems to databases. It is built on decades of progress and integrates those lessons into a language designed to scale correctness and performance together.
In my own code (primarily C++ and Rust), Zig wouldn’t solve a single core problem I face. Memory safety would still be my responsibility, concurrency would still be entirely manual, performance tuning would remain just as challenging and the type system wouldn’t catch the subtle bugs that matter most. The net result would be cosmetic changes paired with fewer correctness guarantees. Even C, for all its flaws, is better defined than Zig (both in having a detailed, standardized specification and in benefiting from partial formalization).
I am eager and optimistic that Zig starts taking itself seriously as a systems language. With new talent, deeper engagement with existing research and a focus on solving the actual hard problems, not just smoothing over C’s syntax, Zig could grow into something much more than it is today. But until then, the question remains: what problems is Zig actually solving that make it worth adopting over Rust or even modern C++? What concrete systems programming problems has Zig’s development team personally run into that shaped its design and are those really the most critical issues worth addressing in a new systems language?
If all it offers is nicer syntax over the same old pitfalls, I don’t see it and I don’t see why anyone betting on long-term systems software should.
I'm not trying to change your mind either; I'm just trying to understand the enthusiasm around Zig. There's a lot of it! To this day, I still don’t see what hard problems it would help me solve (that other languages make solving easier). At least for me, there’s little novelty or technical intrigue in that sense for any "systems" problem I've worked on.
- Explicit use of allocators: In my experience, hidden allocations rarely cause memory leaks. The real issues are forgetting to free memory, freeing the wrong pointer or managing overlapping objects. Some systems I’ve worked on also use different allocators or representations for the same types (e.g., for succinct encoding). Stronger type systems and optional automatic memory management make life easier when available.
- Arenas: malloc and free are as first-class as any other allocation mechanism in C. In C++, using alternative allocator types takes a bit more finesse. It’s an opt-in model rather than the default but still a relatively light lift.
- defer: I agree that its use would be significantly reduced but it’s easy to opt into. Many languages provide similar functionality either natively or through libraries, including Rust, C++, Python, C#, Java, D and Swift. Even C has this through GNU extensions (for fun, check out how far the Linux kernel takes this concept).
- Pointers: I love pointers but what helps performance more is explicit typing, stronger provenance and alias analysis.
While I'm not specifically advocating for Rust here, I don’t believe the average safety or correctness of a Zig program will match that of Rust. Rust is memory-safe by design, whereas Zig is not, and Rust also provides elegant solutions to several genuinely hard problems from memory management to events to scalable concurrency and an expressive type system.