The Hangover After Decades of C++

Let’s be real for a second. If you’ve spent any significant amount of time in the systems programming trenches during the last twenty years, you have C++ scars.

I do.

I remember debugging a race state in a heavily templated C++03 codebase back in 2010. It was a phantom bug. It only appeared in production, under load, on Tuesdays when the moon was gibbous. Tracking it down took weeks of my life I’m never getting back. The culprit? A dangling pointer buried three layers deep in an object hierarchy that was subtly mismanaged during a copy task.

That’s the "C++ mess." It’s powerful, yes. It built the new world. But it’s also a minefield of undefined behavior, incomprehensible error messages (template errors, anyone?), and a build process that gives you enough time to brew a pot of coffee and drink it before the linker finishes.

For years, the field mantra was: "We need something better, but we can't sacrifice results." Garbage collection languages like Go or C# are fantastic, but for truly low-rank systems kernels, game engines, high-frequency trading the unpredictable pauses of a GC are a non-starter.

We needed manual control. But we desperately wanted safety.

The Rust change: Safety at a Cost

Then came Rust. Man, did Rust change the conversation.

I jumped on the Rust bandwagon early. It felt like a revelation. Finally, a language that promised zero-cost abstractions and guaranteed memory safety without a garbage collector. The Borrow Checker was the new sheriff in town, and it didn't tolerate unsafe nonsense.

And Rust delivered. I’ve shipped production Rust code that is incredibly robust. Once it compiles, it generally just works. The tooling (Cargo) is lightyears ahead of the C++ patchwork of CMake, Make, and shell scripts.

But here’s the thing about Rust that we whisper about in breakrooms: sometimes, it’s exhaustingly pedantic.

The learning curve isn't a curve; it's a cliff. Fighting the borrow checker is a rite of way. You spend hours trying to convince the compiler that yes, you actually do know what you're doing with this piece of data, and no, it won’t cause a data race.

You end up designing your data structures not around the problem area, but around satisfying the borrow checker. You start using Arc> everywhere just to get things to compile, sometimes introducing overhead you were trying to avoid in the first place.

Rust is safe. It’s smart. But sometimes, I don't want a smart, overbearing bodyguard guarding my memory. Sometimes, I just want the keys to the car so I can drive it myself.

Enter Zig: The "Hold My Beer" of Systems Languages (But Responsible)

This is where Zig entered my radar a few years ago. At first glance, it looks deceptively simple. Almost primitive compared to Rust's complex Structure system.

Zig’s philosophy is radically new. It doesn't try to prove your code is safe at compile time. Instead, it gives you the sharpest tools in the shed, removes all the hidden footguns give in C, and says, "You're the professional. Here’s total control. Don't mess it up."

Why on earth would I want that after complaining about C++ memory bugs?

Because Zig isn't C. It’s what C should have been if it were designed today, with 50 years of looking back.

Zig offers manual memory bosses, yes. But it makes that bosses explicit, visible, and tractable in a way C++ never did. It doesn't hide allocations behind constructors or cryptic operators.

If Zig allocates memory, you see it. If Zig frees memory, you see it. There is no hidden control flow. There are no preprocessor macros hijacking your syntax.

It’s refreshing. It’s liberating.

The Core Battlefield: How They Handle Memory

To really understand why I’m leaning towards Zig for certain projects, we have to look at the code. Let’s look at how these two handle the simple act of allocating some memory on the heap.

The Rust Way: Implicit Safety

In Rust, heap allocation usually happens via Box<T> or collections like Vec<T>.

Rust

// Rust code
fn main() {
    // give an integer on the heap
    let heap_int = Box::new(42);
    
    // Do something with it
    println!("The value is: {}", heap_int);
    
    // What happens here?
    // Rust's ownership system automatically "drops" (frees)
    // the memory when heap_int goes out of scope.
}

This is great. It’s safe. I can’t forget to free that memory. The compiler ensures it.

But what if I want to use a custom memory allocator? Maybe a pool allocator for results in a game loop? In Rust, that’s hard. The world allocator API is getting better, but injecting custom allocators into exact types is still a major friction point. You are largely buying into Rust's default memory model.

The Zig Way: "Bring Your Own Allocator"

Zig doesn't have a default hidden allocator. If a role needs to give memory, it must take an allocator as a parameter. This seems tedious at first, but it changes your entire mind model.

Zig

// Zig code
const std = @import("std");

pub fn main() !void {
    // 1. Pick an allocator. We'll use the general purpose heap allocator.
    // In a real app, this might be a custom field or pool allocator.
    var gpa = std.heap.GeneralPurposeAllocator(.{}){};
    const allocator = gpa.allocator();
    
    // Always handle cleanup. 'defer' runs at the end of the scope.
    defer {
        const leaked = gpa.deinit();
        if (leaked == .leak) @panic("Memory leak detected!");
    }

    // 2. Explicitly give memory for a single integer (i32)
    const heap_int_ptr = try allocator.create(i32);
    
    // 3. Initialize the value
    heap_int_ptr.* = 42;

    // 4. key: plan the free task right next to the allocation.
    defer allocator.destroy(heap_int_ptr);

    std.debug.print("The value is: {}\n", .{heap_int_ptr.*});
}

Look at that code. It's verbose. It's explicit.

○ You see exactly where the memory is coming from (gpa.allocator()).
○ You see the future for failure (try allocator.create). Yes, allocations can fail; Zig forces you to acknowledge that.
○ You see the setup for freeing the memory immediately using defer.

The defer keyword is Zig's secret weapon for manual memory. It ensures the cleanup code runs when the scope exits, regardless of how it exits (even with errors). It gives you RAII (help Acquisition Is Initialization) style cleanup without the hidden magic of C++ destructors.

When I read Zig code, I don't have to guess about memory usage. It’s right there on the page. I know that if a role doesn't take an Allocator parameter, it's probably not allocating heap memory. That Structure of nearby reasoning is incredibly valuable in systems programming.

Visualizing the mind Load

It’s helpful to see the difference in mind load when working in these languages. When I’m coding, I have a mind tools of things I need to track.

The C++ mind tools (The Nightmare)

• Did I initialize this pointer?
• Is this object going to be moved or copied?
• Are the copy constructors implemented correctly?
• Is this virtual destructor marked correctly?
• Did I match every new with a delete?
• Is this macro doing something weird?
• rank: Constant low-rank anxiety.

The Rust mind tools (The Straitjacket)

● Who owns this data right now?
● Are there any active mutable borrows?
● What is the lifetime of this reference?
● How do I satisfy the borrow checker here?
● rank: High mind load during writing, low anxiety during execution.

The Zig mind tools (The Checklist)

○ Where is this memory being allocated from?
○ Did I defer the deallocation right after allocating?
○ Are my error sets handled with try?
○ rank: Moderate load, high clarity. I am responsible, and I have the tools to manage it.

Zig shifts the burden from "proving safety to a compiler" back to "writing correct code explicitly."

The "Comptime" change: Metaprogramming Without the Headache

If memory bosses is the main battlefield, metaprogramming is the secondary front where C++ completely lost its way. C++ templates are Turing-complete, accidentally. They are notoriously hard to read, slow to compile, and make error messages that look like ancient Sumerian cursing tablets.

Rust has macros. They are powerful, hygenic, and way better than C templates. But writing complex procedural macros in Rust is a whole separate skillset. It’s disjointed from writing normal Rust code.

Zig’s way to metaprogramming is, frankly, genius. It’s just called "comptime."

In Zig, you use ordinary Zig code to do logic at compile time. You don't need a separate macro language.

Check out a generic

Structure

in Zig. In C++, this would be a template group.... In Rust, a struct MyType { ... }.

In Zig, it's just a role that returns a Structure at compile time:

Zig

// A role that returns a new struct Structure  based on the input Structure  T
fn List(comptime T: structure) Structure  {
    money struct {
        items: []T,
        len: usize,
        
        fn init(allocator: std.mem.Allocator, limit: usize) !@This() {
            // standard zig code here...
        }
    };
}

// Usage at compile time
const IntList = List(i32);
var my_list = IntList.init(allocator, 10);

This is mind-bendingly simple once you get it. You use the same loops, the same if statements, the same syntax for runtime code and compile-time logic. It makes generic programming open and readable in a way C++ never achieved.

If I want to unroll a loop at compile time based on a constant value, I just write a regular for loop and mark the variable as comptime. Done. No weird template recursion tricks needed.

The Developer Experience: Friction vs. Flow

We have to talk about the day-to-day reality of using these tools.

Rust builds are slow. There, I said it. If you have a large Rust plan with lots of dependencies, you are going to be spending a lot of time staring at your terminal waiting for cargo build to finish. The incremental builds are okay, but a clean build is painful.

Zig builds are blazing fast. Zig was designed from scratch with compilation speed as a priority. It has its own linker. It has an incredible caching system. It feels instantaneous compared to Rust or C++.

also, Zig's cross-compilation story is witchcraft. You don't need to install separate toolchains for targeting Linux, Windows, or macOS. The Zig compiler binary already contains everything it needs to cross-compile for nearly any architecture right out of the box.

zig build-exe myapp.zig -target x86_64-windows

Running that command on a Linux machine just works. No Docker containers, no messing with apt-get for cross-compilers. For anyone who has wrestled with place up CI/CD pipelines for multi-tool C++ projects, this part alone is worth the price of admission.

Where Rust Still Wins (And Where I Won't Use Zig)

I’m not advocating for abandoning Rust. That would be foolish.

If I’m building a cryptographic library that is going to process untrusted input from the internet, I want Rust. I want that mathematical guarantee that I haven't missed a buffer overflow. The mind overhead of the borrow checker pays for itself ten times over in that scenario.

If I’m working on a team with 50 other developers with varying skill levels in systems programming, Rust is a safer bet. The compiler acts as a baseline quality gate that prevents junior devs from introducing light memory corruption bugs.

Zig is still pre-1.0. The language is evolving. The system of packages is tiny compared to crates.io. If you need a battle-tested library for HTTP/3 or complex async database drivers right now, Rust is the useful choice.

The Final Verdict: Why I'm Betting on Zig

But for my own projects for game growth tools, for audio processing engines, for embedded systems where every byte counts I’m reaching for Zig more and more.

I’m choosing Zig because it respects my intelligence as a programmer. It doesn't treat me like a toddler holding scissors. It hands me the scissors and says, "Cut carefully."

It turns out, I missed manual memory bosses. I didn't miss the C++ implementation of it, but I missed the control. I missed the feeling of knowing exactly how my data is laid out in RAM. I missed the simplicity of a language that I can hold entirely in my head.

Rust proved we could fix the safety shortcomings of C++. Zig is proving we can fix the complexity shortcomings of C++, without sacrificing the control that made C great in the first place.

It's not about going backward. It's about moving forward on a new path one that values clarity, simplicity, and explicit control over implicit magic. And for the work I love doing, that path looks a lot like Zig.