ziandrome22

I'm aware of that, and the point still stands for me that I'm not sure what the point of writing in Rust is if you do all of those things.

This gives a decent overview of some of the areas where the focus of Zig is different than Rust. Other than that...I'd just start by reading through the standard library code and the repo to get a feel. It's very very similar to C so you will be immediately comfortable, just cleans up some stuff like removing default global allocator (you pick your malloc basically), better macros (comptime), and encouraging use of non-null terminated strings and fat pointers etc.

https://ziglang.org/learn/why_zig_rust_d_cpp/

I disagree that the language of the compiler doesn't matter. It absolutely matters in some cases, all of which are cases where (ANSI) C is pretty much the only option because of the inherent difficulty of C++ compilers.

You will need to generate code for the target which means LLVM/Clang (a C++ project) must support at the very least some amount of codegen for that target.

I remain unconvinced about the viability of Rust for many kinds of systems programming. I'm not sure how I feel about it in the Linux kernel, although I suppose it doesn't matter since it's likely to not penetrate very deeply so to speak.

If there are any Rust experts around...what am I missing? The way I see it, Rust is still fundamentally designed to work at a higher level of abstraction than C, and is still mostly dependent on C (even C++ really, due to LLVM/Clang). And bare metal or "first compiler" support for bare metal doesn't seem like it's really intended to be a first class use case. At least that's my impression of the ecosystem from the little time I've had to play around with it.

Is this mostly just a thing to get more young people interested in kernel development...allowing them to start out in less important areas and in a language they are passionate about? Or is this a serious proposal about the future of operating systems and other low level infrastructure code? Do you just program everything in unsafe mode? What about runtimes?

It seems to me that Rust isn't even really intended to compete with C for the use cases in which C is dominant in 2023. Every indication is that for "serious Rust in production programming" it's mostly a C++ crowd. Whereas for myself and most of the C programmers I know, Zig has sort of filled that similar space and seems to take the concerns of C programmers more seriously and the team has an attitude more in line with the C culture than the Rust team does. I could spend hours writing examples of this but it's even apparent in the way the Zig team has handled its relationship with LLVM, where they seem very serious about trying to not accept it as fundamental to their language and eventually even eliminate the dependency on the C++ code...with Rust it doesn't seem like this is even on the minds of most of the users. It's purely a dependency for them and that isn't seen as being fundamentally at odds with the intended use cases. That is totally okay...but it ain't the C culture if we are to accept that such a thing exists.