What Zig felt like, coming from Rust

A Rust developer with seven years' experience reimplemented a JSONPath library (RFC 9535) in Zig to compare the languages. The experience highlighted a surprisingly thin IDE ecosystem for Zig, which pushed work back to the command line and made build.zig central for tasks like running unit tests, targeted tests, a compliance suite, and checks. Project layout favored a flat file structure: Zig nudges colocating related code in a few files rather than the deep module hierarchies common in Rust, which the author found simpler for medium-sized projects. Testing felt more verbose in Zig; inline tests are possible but integrating them with a flat layout required explicit build.zig wiring.

The biggest substantive difference was paradigm and memory management. Rust’s functional-friendly features - monadic error handling, iterators, immutability, and ownership - encourage pure transformations and eliminate classes of ownership bugs. Zig, by design, pushes in-place mutation and explicit allocator use, which forced different designs and manual bookkeeping. The author encountered real allocator-related bugs (leaks when errdefer was omitted, double-free from incorrect deinit ownership) and fixed them by adjusting defer placement and ownership transfer. The conclusion: Zig offers lower-level control and a simpler project surface at the cost of ergonomic functional abstractions and compile-time ownership guarantees, requiring careful manual memory discipline.