[matklad]

There's a change in the tradeoffs in the above scenario:

- you still get extra benefit from Rust, but the magnitude of the benefit is reduced (e.g., no UAF without F).

- you still get extra drawbacks from Rust, but the magnitude of drawbacks is increased, as Rust generally punishes you for not allocating (boxing is a common escape hatch to avoid complex lifetimes).

Just how much tradeoff is shifted is hard to qualify unambiguously, but, from my PoV (Rust since 2015, TB/Zig since late 2022), Zig was and is the right choice in this context.

[jtrueb]

I mainly use Rust in embedded now. I don’t always rely on encoding all of the correctness in the Rust type system. To a degree all the old ways of enforcing correctness are still in play, I am just choosing when to take use idiomatic Rust or escape hatch out via shim to C-style Rust. It reminds me quite a bit of how C and C++ shops require another layer of macros or templates be used for containers, resources, etc.

The build time of Zig seems like the most desirable piece worth deciding over. Developer time is money, but it isn’t weird to have multi-hour build times in a mature project either C, C++, or Rust. The correctness suite is a bigger time sink than the build though. When building a database, you could drive the build time to 0 and still have hours in CI.