I find Zig much more user friendly than Rust. I have been able to do much more with Zig than Rust in one-tenth the time. I am not writing any code that requires the guarantees Rust may provide, and Zig seems to make it easier to write safer C-type code to boot.

Zig doesn't force you to free all your memory (which occasionally good), so there are whole classes of errors that Rust/ATS avoid that are possible in Zig.

I don't think I'd call Rust user friendly.

If the problem is the type system/borrow checker, it's simply a question of experience.

Not when writing GUI like code, to the point that the Rust team acknowledges that additional work needs to be done after NLL lands on stable.

http://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2018/11/01/afte...

http://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2018/11/10/afte...

So while Rust is much more productive than ATS or Cyclone, there is still room of improvement for that experience.

There's always room for improvement, but speaking of GUI, gtk-rs is pretty usable already.

It is, if you don't mind sprinkling your code with Rc<RefCell<item>> everywhere, as means to access widget struct members in callbacks.