Ask HN: Is Zig worth it over Rust in 2026?

Posted by soywod 20 hours ago

I used to know people who switched from Rust to Zig, and swore they would never go back to Rust. I personally tried Zig but I definitely prefered Rust (syntax, tooling, community). This was years ago. Zig is way more mature now. I'm still curious about it. But I recently read an article (cannot find it anymore…) claiming that AI handles way better Rust than Zig. The Rust compiler prevents AI to build non-sense. The author switched from Zig to Rust just for this reason. So I was wondering if Zig is still a smart choice in 2026 with AI over Rust? Enough to migrate tools from Rust to Zig?

Comments

Comment by dyingkneepad 3 hours ago

I may be wrong, but my personal experience is just that AIs are better at better-documented languages. By now, Rust is very well documented, perhaps significantly better than Zig (I haven't verified!).

Try asking an AI to write OpenCL shaders for you. It constantly hallucinates function calls that don't exist. I presume it is just because the language is does not have the ocean of documentation that others have.

Comment by iExploder 13 hours ago

My read is that If your codebase needs a lot of unsafe - on intersection of hw, need a lot of memory allocations with custom memory allocators, can take advantage of comptime, using a lot of c dependencies anyway. Maybe zig makes sense? It's a very niche space.

Comment by gysakai 10 hours ago

Yeah, same here.When I had AI test the code, the compiler catching its mistakes helped it keep going on its own and produce more robust code faster. Just my impression, thought.

Comment by grugdev42 6 hours ago

Worth it for what?

The "what" is important.

Comment by speedgoose 14 hours ago

It depends. PHP can be a better choice than Rust in some cases. But in general, in my opinion, no.