IMHO you should spend one weekend with tinkering with Rust and another weekend tinkering with Zig (e.g. up to a point where you can write simple but still not completely trivial programs both in Rust and Zig), and then decide for yourself which one better matches your taste.
For some people the huge 'surface area' and strict type system of Rust is a big turn-off, while others want exactly that from a programming language.
Rust takes more than a week to really get. However it has a much more mature ecosystem both in terms of available libraries as well as documentation.
One main difference is that Rust is guaranteed memory safe with generally no runtime overhead for that safety. It also has protections and abstractions to make multithreaded code safe and generally correct.
Have you done any ML-lineage languages before (ocaml, Haskell)? If yes, did you like it? If yes, the answer to your question is probably Rust. The thing about Rust is that it’s kind of this Frankenstein language with a lot of foundational influence coming from ML lineage languages (algebraic data types, traits, combinator heavy programming, etc) but with curly braces and memory management part unique (lifetimes) part modern C++ (smart pointers).
I see Zig as being a lot more in C tradition and lineage with nicer and safer memory management techniques. Also comptime (Lisp-ish there?)
My two cents
I feel like Zig is closer to "better C" and Rust is closer to "better C++". So I'd pick based on whether you are more in a C mood or a C++ mood.
You need to learn both. Both borrow checker (Rust) and comptime (Zig) are huge ideas worth getting your hands dirty with.
If you don't have time to learn both, then learn Zig, as it requires much smaller time investment (though do try to find time for both).
Oh my gosh, that would be incredible! In one of my rust projects, I used enum dispatch so simple functions could be inlined, but it used a slightly hacky macro that couldn't do static dispatch. One of those things that comptime matches very well.
Why not learn both?
For hobby projects, zig will get you *much* closer to the underlying system. So if your goal is systems programming where you're responsible for and get to play with the system itself. Zig will get you there much faster, and the language wont take much time to learn and have fun with.
Surely someone will now attempt to correct me, by asserting it's impossible for anyone to write safe code without rust, and it's improper for me to even suggest Zig. But I'm enjoying the language a lot. It's easy to pick up and understand, and importantly it gets out of your way quickly so you can build exactly the system you want.
For more complex or professional projects however, I would still recommend Zig but more because I can't stand rust. It bothers me that it rejects valid programs because the compiler is unable to prove what I can. So the additional dance rust requires ruins an otherwise fine language.
edit: my default language before zig was also python, so feels reasonable to also mention that I'm pretty sure it'll be significantly easier to transition from python into Zig rather than into rust. There's a number of idioms and expectations from python that fit well in zig, but dont fit in rust.
I see people say that if you like C you'll like Zig, and if you like C++ you'll like Rust. I kinda disagree, since both languages take a lot from C and C++.
Rust feels like "let's take the best safety features from both", while Zig feels like "let's take the best transparency from both". In a way, Rust's traits are more foreign to C++ than Zig's comptime, as Zig has similar duck typing (though the ergonomics are much cleaner, especially with @compileError).
I'm in a similar position, I want to learn both eventually but chose to start with Rust because it has several really strong-seeming (like the intro book, or Rust Atomics and Locks), while Zig doesn't have many books yet.
The need for book-length expositions is much greater for Rust.
I totally agree with the "try both", but if part of your motivation to learn one is to use it for a job, Rust is more mature than Zig (Zig is not yet 1.0, and still making exciting breaking changes to the languag), and Rust currently has more adoption than Zig- parts of Firefox, Chrome, Android, Windows, Linux, AWS, Azure (and I'm sure thre are more).
Zig is gaining integration into larger projects (Ghostty, TigerBeetle, Roc, Ubers build system come to mind), but it's not yet achieved Rust's success
Zig is easier to get up and running with. Rust is easier to land a job with. Rust is more novel (borrow checker), while Zig is likely more familiar (unique blend of existing ideas).
It really depends what you mean by "interesting" :-)
Short answer: If you like to use pointers in business logic (E.g. not just for MMIO and addressing physical memory): Zig. Otherwise: Rust.
Note that there are a number of domains where Zig might be a practical option in the future, but aren't now due to library support. With Rust, you will reinvent wheels more than most people have an appetite for. In Zig, you will do this for most things.
The main difference I've noticed is that the core devs in the rust community are, above all, extremely thoughtful and systematic about how language changes address the core language goals. The zig devs I've interacted with seem much more focused on having a clean developer experience instead of trying to find elegant solutions to hard language design problems. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's a very different thing. In particular, the borrow checker is enforcing rules 99% of your pointer code should be following anyway.
The main complaint about the borrow checker is that what seem like trivial changes can have subtle implications that require wildly different ownership patterns to be made correct. Rust tells you something's wrong. If you don't thoroughly understand how you're using pointers (which few people do), it can feel like trivial changes exploding into much larger refactors than you'd need in languages where the rules aren't statically enforced.
Zig is not done yet. They make breaking changes with each minor version.
I have been writing small Zig projects for a couple of minor releases now, and this is no joke. They are not afraid to change core features in breaking ways. However, they do a good job with migration guides, and the breaking changes always feel like a very thoughtful step in a good direction. I'm very excited to see where Zig lands when it stabilizes.
only you can decide what you find interesting.
More information is needed to give proper advice:
- Do you like filling out the type annotations in Python (making sure linter check passes)? Do you like TYPES in general?
- Do you like working with memory (crushing memory bugs, solving leaks)?
- Do you prefer imperative or functional approach more?
IMO type checking is the best thing to happen to Python in recent memory and eliminates a whole class of developer errors. Getting linters to pass 100% also scratches a weird itch for me, like collecting items in a video game haha.
I do like working with memory, seeing a custom slab allocator used in production code was one of the more interesting aspects of the little experience I had with c++, but always having to be "on guard" so as to not shoot myself in the foot with pointer manipulation was kind of exhausting.
I like both.
That "itch" is exactly what I meant, lol! And I agree!
I'd definitely give Rust a try. Playing around with types and traits until they click is genuinely addictive - it feels like solving a puzzle or something
My world sounds exactly like yours and I love the astral packages - thanks for asking this
Increasingly I feel like these two have very different audiences.
Disappointingly as a Rust dev, I don't actually see a lot of Rust being used for "systems" development (OS, driver, DB internals, embedded, etc), but increasingly for network services/web services/web stack work, heavily biased towards tokio async driven applications. It's a lot of engineers living further up the stack, leaning on frameworks, and in applications with very large dependency tree footprints. As a % anyways. There's a lot more Rust code out there than Zig.
I think Zig has a far more minimalistic thing going on and I like that. I find its type system a lot more primitive, and would miss ADTs/enums, and the borrow checker etc. but I like its overall philosophy better.
Zig has closed enums, so you can recover some of Rust's sum type safety.
I’d choose Rust because of the better safety guarantees and nice tooling.