I imagine it's a difficult time to be a Zig developer.

In the near term, Bun choosing to switch from Zig to Rust specifically to fix all the memory errors seems to have done the Zig community some psychological damage.

But more significantly, in the medium term it looks likely that AI coding is going to overtake the industry before Zig gets properly established. And it is going to be very hard to justify choosing Zig for your sloppy-but-functional AI-written code - why open yourself up to memory unsafety on top of everything else? Further, the Zig community appears to value a hand-crafted, 'artisanal' approach to software development, which is the very antithesis of vibecoding.

I have no particular interest in Zig as a language but definitely feel some empathy here. The industry is changing in ways that many of us are struggling to process.

> before Zig gets properly established.

zig is reasonably established. the llms write pretty good zig. see project linked below which is almost entirely llm-written

> And it is going to be very hard to justify choosing Zig for your sloppy-but-functional AI-written code

why? because one project that was shipping fast made a dog's breakfast of it?

> why open yourself up to memory unsafety on top of everything else?

this can be addressed by third parties in the reasonable near-term. for example:

https://github.com/ityonemo/clr

the zig team says that in the future stabilizing the IR and providing an API will happen.

fwiw in the process of building this project the llms have never once written a memory safety error in the "lib" section (in the src section there was a lot of tripping over segfaults since memory mapping datatypes accessed by a dylib can get hairy)

> In the near term, Bun choosing to switch from Zig to Rust specifically to fix all the memory errors seems to have done the Zig community some psychological damage.

Meanwhile, some projects are doing the opposite, like going from Rust to Zig, here's an example from a podcast I recently listened to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSXGf3oN2yU

Here's the project in question: https://github.com/roc-lang/roc

I think Bun just got a lot of visibility because of the speed and scope of the migration, which both shook things up and I guess was good PR cause that made a lot of headlines.