Is this the sort of thing you only need to know about if building/maintaining compilers? I ask because I don't know what that means from a practical perspective. I'm familiar with Ferrous systems from their work on probe-rs, defmt, and flip-link, which are exquisite libraries / tools.

edit: I think this is a bot or troll account.

Rust never had a goal of having well defined spec. It all depends on what ecosystem wants.

In lieu of that it didn't fuck up.

I'm one of those people who's adopting Zig :) But I don't think it's best for every project. For context, I've used Rust before for probably two years writing a realtime audio synthesis engine, so I'm fairly familiar with Rust vs Zig for handling low level details.

The biggest reason I use Zig is it's a very explicit language. The creators made a very intentional decision to avoid too many "high level" designs. This doesn't mean there's no capabilities for abstraction (comptime is great for that), but when you see array indexing, you can think "ptr + index * size with bounds check". There's lots of other things like that where the language does exactly one thing, and that thing is a low level operation.

This is terrible when you want to create high level abstractions that hide details from the programmer, but it's what I need when doing realtime audio synthesis or what I'm doing now which is writing an interpreter. I know exactly what allocates, I know what calls IO and can block (both operations explicitly take in an allocator or IO parameter), no data structures have private fields so I can always poke around at the insides. I know what types of errors a function returns, and creating errors is cheap with Zig's error union design.

So I don't use Zig because I think it's the safer language, I know it has sharp edges because of the number of times I've caused a panic on a poisoned pointer or use-after-free. But because it gives me such a transparent view into what is happening I find it liberating.

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For what it's worth, this is not only that specific instance. Rust might not be memory safe in theory, but when talking about "in practice" - there is profound evidence that Rust's memory safety works.

What would you have preferred the devs work on instead?

i suppose a supply chain that doesn't exist is pretty secure.