I often use LLMs to build and modify open-source tools for personal use and Rust's compile times are disgusting, eg. Codex CLI taking over 15 minutes to recompile on my fairly high-end machine. Zig's incremental compilation optimizations are amazing, giving near-instant recompiles measured in ms instead of minutes. I would certainly classify four orders of magnitude faster compilation as a tangible benefit even if you're not writing the code by hand.
Rust is quite slow but that is an interesting benefit but still not sure what the trade offs are, Rust has a huge mature ecosystem and there are lot of jobs for it.
Are you able to ship faster with Zig vs Rust? How did you arrive at the 4x figure?
I'm really puzzled why people are so angry over using ai assistance with Zig. LLMs are always going to be able to write better code faster and better than anyone who calls themselves code artisans in this day and age.
I think this comment posted a while back someone who worked on Zig is pretty telling:
> The key problem with Zig nowadays is how much of its community and adoption is driven by anti-Rust sentiment. As a result, while Rust puts beginner onboarding and documentation at the center of its culture, as opposed to the “C neckbeard”'s culture, Zig is going the other way around.
And ultimately this didn't stop people from using AI generating Zig code as much of the users in the thread are already using it to ship quality faster.
Happy to use the work the community outputs and culture is largely irrelevant when prompting LLMs outputs code that doesn't really require any intimate knowledge with the syntaxes
> LLMs are always going to be able to write better code faster and better than anyone who calls themselves code artisans in this day and age.
LLMs can't write better code faster than any reasonably competent human. They suck at writing code, and if you're outsourcing programming to them the software you produce will suck as well.
