As someone who’s been developing in Rust for the past few years, I never expected to venture far from the comfort of its robust tooling and powerful abstractions. But curiosity — and a few frustrations — got the better of me. I’d heard whispers about Zig: a language that promises simplicity, performance, and full control over memory. So I did what any language nerd might do — I rewrote one of my medium-sized Rust projects in Zig.

This article isn’t a side-by-side benchmark or a deep dive into language theory. It’s a narrative of the experience: the good, the bad, and the surprisingly delightful.

The Project

The original project was a command-line tool that parses JSON files, applies transformations, and outputs them in a user-defined format. It involves file I/O, basic data structures, some error handling, and a few performance-sensitive loops.

In Rust, the codebase was ~1,200 lines with heavy use of enums, traits, and Result<T, E> error handling.

First Impressions: Zig’s Philosophy

Zig feels like C with a modern coat of paint. It strips away the safety scaffolding that Rust leans on, and in doing so, offers something raw and incredibly flexible. There’s no borrow checker, no lifetimes to…