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Zig feels more practical than Rust for real-world CLI tools
A deep dive into the practical advantages of Zig over Rust for building command-line interfaces.
The borrow checker operates during compile time, which means that it can only catch memory safety issues that can be determined statically, before the program is actually run. Your CLI tool can still crash, produce wrong results, corrupt files, leak sensitive data, be vulnerable to various types of attacks or just behave in a way that is not expected. This combined with Zig’s defer statement which allows you to schedule cleanup code to run when a scope is exited, makes it easy to manage resources gives you most of the power of Rust’s borrow checker at your disposal without the complexity and ritual.
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