io_uring has been one of the greatest sources of exploits for the Linux kernel in years. io_uring has resulted in so many practical privilege escalation attacks that many containers completely block it, and companies like Google keep it entirely disabled. RHEL also ships a kernel without it by default.

This is an example why Go is such a successful language, in my view. It hides the async complexity and allows you to pretend you have a simple continuous thread of execution. It's just cheaper than system threads. Imagine if operating system threads and the blocking syscalls were this efficient.

I've spent the last year building a similar runtime for Zig. Purely because I want my applications to forget they are using things like io_uring in the background.

This to me reads like an LLMism.

This has not been my experience; Claude does a great job of writing unit tests for the Zig code, and combined with Zig's fuzzing features and a Python-based integration testing suite, I have avoided hitting runtime UB so far. In exchange, I get much faster compile times, which are important for the agentic development loop.

> Rust trades the low-level clarity for compiler-enforced safety. If you're not a code artisan or don't care about being one, then please use Rust.

Not really seeing the connection here. What do you mean by code artisan? Are you trying to gatekeep Zig because you think Zig is too difficult for LLMs?

In general, what helps is to instruct ai to use test coverage to ensure the cover all edge cases with tests.

> Zig's value prop is different and closer to a modern C: it fits in your head and it maps fairly closely to assembly.

This can't be correct for the simple reason that it has both a modern optimizing compiler (LLVM) and UB.

A modern compiler will try to autovectorize your code, so you don't really know what the assembly will be.

UB gives compiler license to rewrite your code however it sees fit.

Like programming in a kind of super strict IL. Or the opposite : super poweful, super abstract language, yet extremely strict.

The question I ask myself is “would I write a game in Rust?” Zig seems like a better fit: you can be clever without being chided by the borrow checker. But as a “code artisan”, there’s an interesting challenge in making it work with Rust.

I might use Zig on a project if it was just me. I wouldn’t use it with the a team that I didn’t hand pick.

Smart people like Zig. Smart people like Rust. Smart people like LLMs. It’s a big Venn diagram. It be great if we could not bash each other.

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

---

Edit for replies complaining I used debug.print:

Okay, `try std.io.getStdOut().writer().print("Hello, world!\n", .{});`. Still one line, more explicit with chained methods, but that still just goes to show you how arbitrary this metric is -- Zig's standard library makes you be more explicit with one function, but it doesn't make you be as explicit with another one that works essentially the same way but writes to a different stream, ergo this has nothing to do with the language's inherent explicitness but rather comparing the implementation of a single random function.

Sure it wastes a bit of time always figure it out when it fails to compile.

This is why I’m excited to see qwen3.8 27b removed a bunch of knowledge for more reasoning. Baked in old zig api is worthless

Zig has benefits, like comptime, no hidden control flow, memory mngmt, cross compilation etc. But its syntax is just a mouthfull of wats, whys and wtfs.

I can forsee a compile to Zig languge popping up sometime soon.

in general, I like zig syntax, but i find that it had very little regard to how the eye moves on the page. it’s jarring at times.

> In Java, there’s a similarly looking thread interruption mechanism. Critically, it doesn’t support interrupting syscalls: IOException and InterruptedException are both checked and unrelated, meaning that IOing functions are not interruptible

One says IOing functions are not interruptible, other says "You can interrupt a blocking IO operation" :)

The article just references Thread.interrupt

Disclaimer: I haven’t looked at Zig’s implementation; I’m only going off how the Unix APIs work.