Zig and the design choices within

Opinion piece: On Zig (and the design choices within)

Opinion piece: On Zig (and the design choices within)

2025-10-14

dark mode? back?

(From someone who has spent far too much time thinking about the designs of programming languages)

This post is split up into a few sections. I would also like to preface this post with:

Existing memory safe languages are not perfect. Rust will be used as an example quite a bit, as from what is currently avaliable, it embodies closer to what I think is reasonable in a programming language. However, there is still much room for improvement in this space. All of the following is ultimately my opinion. If you disagree, you are welcome to find me somewhere on the internet and ask me more. I bear no grudge or ill will against anyone who contributes to, works on, or is otherwise involved in the Zig community. The following are things I have noted about the language, not the people behind it. If you enjoy Zig, go and write it, and make cool stuff - I am not the programming language police. Exception to the above: I have one gripe about the Zig community. This gripe "targets" no one person in particular; rather, larger trends.

Ideological differences

Memory

First, and very much foremost, Zig is not memory safe. This is, in my opinion, the most egregious thing in this post, by a very large margin. Moreso, Zig does not make any attempt to be memory safe - it can catch some things at runtime, with specific allocators, but so can C these days. Indeed, there are some cases, like use-after-realloc, that asan can catch and Zig cannot.

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