GoKawiilWhat Zig felt like, coming from Rust
Intro
I’ve spent the last 7 years as a Rust developer, working mostly on open source projects, and I’d like to think I’ve built a solid feel for the language and its ecosystem along the way. I gravitate toward the functional side of Rust like clean functions, expressive types, that sort of thing. But I’m always curious about other languages, and Zig has been on my radar for a while as a candidate C successor: lower-level, lighter-weight, and steadily earning its place among the languages people take seriously. I spent time with C earlier in my career, so the comparison always felt like it would be interesting to make.
One caveat worth stating up front: my experience with Zig begins with this project. Some of the observations will look naive and obvious for the people who work with Zig on daily basis and some of the decisions I made along the way were almost certainly not the optimal ones, they were shaped more by habits carried over from Rust than by deep Zig idiom. That’s fine, everyone has to start somewhere, and in the meantime I’m leaning on whatever cross-language intuition I’ve built up over the years, for better or worse.
To make the comparison fair, I decided to reimplement something I’d already built in Rust, not a toy, but not a sprawling project either, and ideally something the community could actually use. I settled on JSONPath: a query language for JSON, specified in RFC 9535. The Rust version already existed (jsonpath-rust), and the goal was to bring the same thing to Zig: zig-jsonpath.
IDE support
The first thing that caught me off guard — and honestly, who would’ve expected this to be the memorable part — was IDE support, or the near-total lack of it. I’d been using RustRover for Rust and various JetBrains flavors for other languages, and Zig, by comparison, offered little beyond syntax highlighting and basic autocompletion. It wasn’t exactly surprising, but it did force me back to basics: learning to work with the language largely from the command line. What started as a drawback turned into one of the more interesting parts of the experience. It turns out I’d simply forgotten how straightforward it can be to rely on bare CLI tooling.
The first real lesson here was build.zig , which handles this with surprising ease. I eventually settled on this setup:
zig build test # run all tests zig build test -Dfilter = "filter match function basic" # run one test zig build test -Ddebug-query = true # all tests with debug zig build compliance # compliance suite zig build check # unit tests + compliance
Once you accept the terms, it’s genuinely refreshing to work with.
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