namr2000 2 hours ago

Rust is a world away from Zig as far as being low-level. Rust does not have manual memory management and revolves around RAII which hides a great deal of complexity from you. Moreover it is not unusual for a Rust project to have 300+ dependencies that deal with data structures, synchronization, threading etc. Zig has a rich std lib, but is otherwise very bare and expects you to implement the things you actually want.

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Ygg2 2 hours ago | parent [-]

This depends on what you mean by low level. Commonly it means, how much you need to take care about minute, low-level issues. In that way C, Rust, and Zig are about the same.

Dependencies have nothing to do with low-level vs. high-level but just package management, how well the language composes, and how rich the standard library is. Are assumptions in package A able to affect package B. In C that's almost impossible to avoid, because different people have different ideas about how long their objects live.

Having a rich standard library isn't just a pure positive. More code means more maintenance.

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namr2000 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I agree with you that package management has nothing to do with how low-level a language is.

That being said Rust is definitely a much higher level language than either C or Zig. The availability of `Arc` and `Box`, the existence and reliance on `drop`, and all of `async` are things that just wouldn't exist in Zig and allow Rust programmers to think at higher levels of abstraction when it comes to memory management.

> Having a rich standard library isn't just a pure positive. More code means more maintenance.

I would argue it's much worse to rely on packages that are not in the standard library since its harder to gain trust on maintenance and quality of the code you rely on. I do agree that more code is almost always just more of a burden though.

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Ygg2 an hour ago | parent [-]

> That being said Rust is definitely a much higher level language than either C or Zig. The availability of `Arc` and `Box`, the existence and reliance on `drop`

I mean, C++ have RAII and stuff like unique pointer, does that make it higher level than Zig?

And what if you don't use Arc or Box? Is your program now lower level than baseline Rust?

As I said, depends a lot about what you mean by low level.

	▲	namr2000 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		It depends on the facilities the language offers to you by default right? C++ offers much higher level primitives out of the box compared to Zig, so I'd say its a higher level language. Of course you can ignore all the features of C++ and just write C, but that's not why people are picking the language.