How (memory) safe is Zig? (2021)

a year ago

Zig's memory safety is often compared to C or Rust, but it doesn't match Rust's systematic prevention of memory unsafety.
Zig introduces adhoc runtime checks (e.g., bounds checking, null pointer disallowing) but lacks composable compile-time proofs like Rust.
Zig improves over C with features like allocator APIs for detecting use-after-free, generics, and safer defaults.
Memory safety bugs in Zig are common, especially in complex projects, unlike Rust, which significantly reduces such issues.
Zig's future may lie in niches like sandboxed plugins (e.g., WASM) where its small binary size and low memory usage are advantageous.
Rust's memory safety is appealing for high-performance, secure systems, but managed languages (e.g., Java, C#) are improving in performance.
Zig's comptime mechanism offers unique compile-time specialization possibilities, inspiring future language design innovations.

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