I don't think Zig is different enough from rust or any other systems language for it to matter. If you can write rust you can write Zig.

▲

jaggederest 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Anthropic makes claude, claude can write Rust like a champ and struggles at Zig. It's a straightforward "training data" argument.

I think there are even longer term plays that Anthropic should be looking at, in this space, but it seems like they've decided rust is the right thing, so fair play. I would be (am!) thinking about making an LLM optimized high level language that you can generate / train on intensively because you control the language spec.

▲

aabhay 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Claude doesn’t write Rust like a champ. It’s still miles ahead at js and python than it is at rust. It can do macros and single file optimizations but its gotten really stuck in type hell and tried to dyn everything on multiple occasions for me.

	▲	vlovich123 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Claude struggling at Rust: not getting types correct, using the wrong abstractions, not implementing things correctly Claude struggling at Zig: the above + memory safety issues if you run “fast” mode. It is generally true that Rust code tends to be written in a way that the compiler catches the issue at compile time. The same is not as true for Zig, Python or JS

▲

dnautics 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

claude does not struggle with zig? not in my hands anyways.

▲

speed_spread 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm reminded of the old joke "how to shoot yourself in the foot in 25 different languages". The first one was "C - you shoot yourself in the foot." Zig remains very close to that philosophy.

So the difference is not in writing new stuff but in maintaining the existing codebase. Rust's rigidity makes it potentially harder to break stuff compared to Zig's general flexibility. As a project grows and matures, different types of contributors naturally come in and it's unreasonable to expect everyone to learn about historical footguns that may have accumulated.