So the difference is not in writing new stuff but in maintaining the existing codebase. Rust's rigidity makes it potentially harder to break stuff compared to Zig's general flexibility. As a project grows and matures, different types of contributors naturally come in and it's unreasonable to expect everyone to learn about historical footguns that may have accumulated.

I think there are even longer term plays that Anthropic should be looking at, in this space, but it seems like they've decided rust is the right thing, so fair play. I would be (am!) thinking about making an LLM optimized high level language that you can generate / train on intensively because you control the language spec.

Among them:

- much easier to iterate on (due to the language being simpler and compilation much faster)

- native C/C++ interops (Zig can compile C and C++ and mix it with Zig) which is crucial for a node-replacement runtime that runs an open source JS engine

- fewer dependencies and trivial static linking

I guess that now that they've been acquired by Anthropic there's this combination of having both in-house Rust talent, AI which does better on Rust, and the funding and resources necessary to undertake such a migration.

something JS-adjacent could certainly be more known than an obscure language but are that many people using drop-in node replacements?