IMHO you should spend one weekend with tinkering with Rust and another weekend tinkering with Zig (e.g. up to a point where you can write simple but still not completely trivial programs both in Rust and Zig), and then decide for yourself which one better matches your taste.

For some people the huge 'surface area' and strict type system of Rust is a big turn-off, while others want exactly that from a programming language.

Rust takes more than a week to really get. However it has a much more mature ecosystem both in terms of available libraries as well as documentation.

One main difference is that Rust is guaranteed memory safe with generally no runtime overhead for that safety. It also has protections and abstractions to make multithreaded code safe and generally correct.

Brown PLT group has a lot of Rust resources like a debugger for traits https://cel.cs.brown.edu/blog/an-interactive-debugger-for-ru... a model of ownership types https://blog.brownplt.org/2023/09/17/rust-ownership.html and an experimental rewrite of the Rust book https://rust-book.cs.brown.edu/

Systems programming can be done in ocaml or any language really where there is some documentation on the runtime how not to trigger the GC or flags that can be passed to custom set GC policy

There was an interesting post comparing Zig and Rust and Go here yesterday: https://sinclairtarget.com/blog/2025/08/thoughts-on-go-vs.-r...

Hacker News discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46153466

Why not learn both?

For hobby projects, zig will get you *much* closer to the underlying system. So if your goal is systems programming where you're responsible for and get to play with the system itself. Zig will get you there much faster, and the language wont take much time to learn and have fun with.

Surely someone will now attempt to correct me, by asserting it's impossible for anyone to write safe code without rust, and it's improper for me to even suggest Zig. But I'm enjoying the language a lot. It's easy to pick up and understand, and importantly it gets out of your way quickly so you can build exactly the system you want.

For more complex or professional projects however, I would still recommend Zig but more because I can't stand rust. It bothers me that it rejects valid programs because the compiler is unable to prove what I can. So the additional dance rust requires ruins an otherwise fine language.

edit: my default language before zig was also python, so feels reasonable to also mention that I'm pretty sure it'll be significantly easier to transition from python into Zig rather than into rust. There's a number of idioms and expectations from python that fit well in zig, but dont fit in rust.

You need to learn both. Both borrow checker (Rust) and comptime (Zig) are huge ideas worth getting your hands dirty with.

If you don't have time to learn both, then learn Zig, as it requires much smaller time investment (though do try to find time for both).

For what it’s worth there’s a comptime crate for Rust. Not as elegant as a language level feature but probably accomplishes very much similar things.

https://docs.rs/comptime/latest/comptime/

There are plans to experiment with language level comptime support too: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/148820

This is a very interesting feature, especially if comptime can become a true language superset with features such as the ability for seamless type-level programming, leveraging `const fn` code throughout. This would unlock the potential for having true dependent types in (the comptime portion of) Rust programs, and write arbitrary end-to-end compiler-verified proofs about code that will ultimately run in the final program.

Oh my gosh, that would be incredible! In one of my rust projects, I used enum dispatch so simple functions could be inlined, but it used a slightly hacky macro that couldn't do static dispatch. One of those things that comptime matches very well.

Love this. Borrow all the good ideas! Would also enjoy compile-time trig functions, exponents etc so we are not invoking lazy/static/once-cell/lazy-cell etc.

I feel like Zig is closer to "better C" and Rust is closer to "better C++". So I'd pick based on whether you are more in a C mood or a C++ mood.

Have you done any ML-lineage languages before (ocaml, Haskell)? If yes, did you like it? If yes, the answer to your question is probably Rust. The thing about Rust is that it’s kind of this Frankenstein language with a lot of foundational influence coming from ML lineage languages (algebraic data types, traits, combinator heavy programming, etc) but with curly braces and memory management part unique (lifetimes) part modern C++ (smart pointers).

I see Zig as being a lot more in C tradition and lineage with nicer and safer memory management techniques. Also comptime (Lisp-ish there?)

My two cents

I'm in a similar position, I want to learn both eventually but chose to start with Rust because it has several really strong-seeming (like the intro book, or Rust Atomics and Locks), while Zig doesn't have many books yet.

The official Zig language reference covers everything you need to know about the language to use it: https://ziglang.org/documentation/master

It links out to the standard library documentation, which is also comprehensive and easy to navigate: https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/std

and yet there’s questions on the semi-official forum on how to read from files properly.

no, the docs really don’t cut it.

it is strongly opinionated about the correct way to do things but it leaves you to your own devices to piece together an understanding from source code, ziggit, and discord.

> and yet there’s questions on the semi-official forum on how to read from files properly.

That is currently in the process of changing. Of course people are discussing things that are changing.

> no, the docs really don’t cut it.

Yes they do :) - source: have written multiple small projects in Zig.

I encourage you to actually read the page I linked from top to bottom if you are interested in learning Zig. I did it because mitchellh mentioned in an interview that it's what he did. It's easy to follow, useful, and not an overwhelming amount of information.

i know zig, i’ve been using it for a few years, i have multiple small projects as well. zig ref is fine, i’m critical of std. the source code has always been the main source of documentation. which means no documentation. std is littered with undocumented behaviours, the build system is still something many people use half-blind.

i’m fine with breaking changes, but the way they’re just dropped onto our laps with almost zero thought put into how to present it. (i started to feel almost as if patiently introducing the concepts and interfaces is one of those things that is below andrew)

while i admit that zig’s authors’ claim to technical excellence is deserved, communication has never been close to it.

and then i’m sure there are people who would gladly involve themselves in documentation efforts, but the chances of receiving andrew’s ire and demeaning disposition are so great that it might be paralysing such efforts leaving it to the Guy himself.

The need for book-length expositions is much greater for Rust.

I see people say that if you like C you'll like Zig, and if you like C++ you'll like Rust. I kinda disagree, since both languages take a lot from C and C++.

Rust feels like "let's take the best safety features from both", while Zig feels like "let's take the best transparency from both". In a way, Rust's traits are more foreign to C++ than Zig's comptime, as Zig has similar duck typing (though the ergonomics are much cleaner, especially with @compileError).

I totally agree with the "try both", but if part of your motivation to learn one is to use it for a job, Rust is more mature than Zig (Zig is not yet 1.0, and still making exciting breaking changes to the languag), and Rust currently has more adoption than Zig- parts of Firefox, Chrome, Android, Windows, Linux, AWS, Azure (and I'm sure thre are more).

Zig is gaining integration into larger projects (Ghostty, TigerBeetle, Roc, Ubers build system come to mind), but it's not yet achieved Rust's success

Short answer: If you like to use pointers in business logic (E.g. not just for MMIO and addressing physical memory): Zig. Otherwise: Rust.

Note that there are a number of domains where Zig might be a practical option in the future, but aren't now due to library support. With Rust, you will reinvent wheels more than most people have an appetite for. In Zig, you will do this for most things.

The main difference I've noticed is that the core devs in the rust community are, above all, extremely thoughtful and systematic about how language changes address the core language goals. The zig devs I've interacted with seem much more focused on having a clean developer experience instead of trying to find elegant solutions to hard language design problems. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's a very different thing. In particular, the borrow checker is enforcing rules 99% of your pointer code should be following anyway.

The main complaint about the borrow checker is that what seem like trivial changes can have subtle implications that require wildly different ownership patterns to be made correct. Rust tells you something's wrong. If you don't thoroughly understand how you're using pointers (which few people do), it can feel like trivial changes exploding into much larger refactors than you'd need in languages where the rules aren't statically enforced.

Zig is easier to get up and running with. Rust is easier to land a job with. Rust is more novel (borrow checker), while Zig is likely more familiar (unique blend of existing ideas).

It really depends what you mean by "interesting" :-)

More information is needed to give proper advice:

- Do you like filling out the type annotations in Python (making sure linter check passes)? Do you like TYPES in general?

- Do you like working with memory (crushing memory bugs, solving leaks)?

- Do you prefer imperative or functional approach more?

IMO type checking is the best thing to happen to Python in recent memory and eliminates a whole class of developer errors. Getting linters to pass 100% also scratches a weird itch for me, like collecting items in a video game haha.

I do like working with memory, seeing a custom slab allocator used in production code was one of the more interesting aspects of the little experience I had with c++, but always having to be "on guard" so as to not shoot myself in the foot with pointer manipulation was kind of exhausting.

I like both.

That "itch" is exactly what I meant, lol! And I agree! I'd definitely give Rust a try. Playing around with types and traits until they click is genuinely addictive - it feels like solving a puzzle or something

only you can decide what you find interesting.

Zig is not done yet. They make breaking changes with each minor version.

I have been writing small Zig projects for a couple of minor releases now, and this is no joke. They are not afraid to change core features in breaking ways. However, they do a good job with migration guides, and the breaking changes always feel like a very thoughtful step in a good direction. I'm very excited to see where Zig lands when it stabilizes.

My world sounds exactly like yours and I love the astral packages - thanks for asking this

Increasingly I feel like these two have very different audiences.

Disappointingly as a Rust dev, I don't actually see a lot of Rust being used for "systems" development (OS, driver, DB internals, embedded, etc), but increasingly for network services/web services/web stack work, heavily biased towards tokio async driven applications. It's a lot of engineers living further up the stack, leaning on frameworks, and in applications with very large dependency tree footprints. As a % anyways. There's a lot more Rust code out there than Zig.

I think Zig has a far more minimalistic thing going on and I like that. I find its type system a lot more primitive, and would miss ADTs/enums, and the borrow checker etc. but I like its overall philosophy better.

Zig has closed enums, so you can recover some of Rust's sum type safety.

I’d choose Rust because of the better safety guarantees and nice tooling.