Zig: a language that most people who like C but not C++ will probably love. simple and compiles fast and deals with undefined behavior and null more safely than C, easy c interop, no garbage collection

rust: more like a safe c++, you can get all the performance of c or c++ with the memory safety of a garbage collected language, as well as data race safety and nulls do bot exist. downsides are it can be a hard to learn paradigm to satisfy the compile time memory checks, and it is slower to compile

nim: sort of like a statically typed python. fun syntax and features, compiles to C, quickly. has in the past used garbage collection but a new reference counting mechanism has been introduced lately.

Thanks, that's just the kind of comparison I was looking for.

If anyone has an idea about the (A) relative stability of the languages, and (B) the number of libraries/packages for things you don't want to write yourself, that'd be great.

Note:

> has in the past used garbage collection but a new reference counting mechanism has been introduced lately.

Reference counting is a kind of garbage collection. It's often faster than the "hello world" of gc, namely mark and sweep, but it has its own challenges.

Nim is also as programmable as Lisp, and memory safe with automatic reference counting.

Thanks for summing it up, so now I know who Zig is targeted at, and it's not me. 8)

This is a great in-depth comparison of Zig and Rust from the POV of someone who has used both extensively for non-toy projects. https://scattered-thoughts.net/writing/assorted-thoughts-on-...

Wow, this is a really in-depth article, and really informative - thanks for sharing!