I’ve spent the last year building keyboards, which has included writing firmware for a variety custom circuit boards.

I initially wrote this firmware in Rust, but despite years of experience with that language I still struggled quite a bit. I eventually got my keyboards working, but it took an embarrassingly long time and wasn’t fun.

After repeated suggestions from my much more Rust-and-computing-experienced friend Jamie Brandon, I rewrote the firmware in Zig, which turned out swimmingly.

I found this quite surprising, given that I’d never seen Zig before and it’s a pre-1.0 language written by a fellow PDX hipster with basically just a single page of documentation.

The experience went so well, in fact, that I now feel just as likely to turn to Zig (a language I’ve used for a dozen hours) as to Rust (which I’ve used for at least a thousand hours).

This, of course, reflects as much about me and my interests as it does about either of these languages. So I’ll have to explain what I want from a systems programming language in the first place…

https://kevinlynagh.com/rust-zig/

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