> Correct Zig != memory safety. It's the opposite: MEMORY SAFETY IS THE GUARANTEE that your code won't have memory error no matter how broken it is!

I think you have a missing piece of factual information here. Safe Zig (which is not "correct Zig") guarantees (or will guarantee) memory safety everywhere, no matter how broken the code is, as long as you don't use unsafe operations -- just as in Rust. Instead of eliminating some issues at compile time, it does so by panicking at runtime.

> Please tell me again how much it cripples productivity and the ability to write correct code!

If you think that you -- and your 20-person team maintaining a project for 20 years -- can be as productive in Rust as you can in Zig, then Rust is for you. That's not the case for me (maybe it's not a universal thing) and I don't think that would be the case for my team. Personally, I think that universal truths in programming are rare, and I think it is very likely that Rust might be more effective for some and Zig more effective for others, even if you only consider correctness. I'm not trying to convince you that Zig is better than Rust for you; I'm just saying that Zig is better than Rust for me.

> Zig and C offers the same level of safety guarantees: none.

I'm afraid you're simply mistaken, and repeating the same assertion over and over does not make it more correct. Safe Zig will give you the same guarantees as safe Rust except data races.

Once you turn safety off, you don't have a guarantee but you also don't have anywhere near the same level of confidence as you do in the safety of the C program. So the choice is not between 99.999999% confidence of a guarantee and, say, 50%, but there's lots in between, and Zig is in the vicinity of where Rust is -- don't know if better or worse -- but is much better than where C is. Correctness is simply not a binary position.

You accept this position yourself: when you run your Rust program, you also have no guarantees about the overall functional correctness of the program. You still don't think that you're in the same position as everyone else with no such guarantees, right? That's because there are lots of other activities needed to be done to increase confidence in correctness, and so there can be a very, very wide range of correctness within that "no guarantee" which is where we all are in most cases. I think that Zig makes some of those activities easier than C++/Rust, at least for me.

> But memory safe, it isn't.

Except it is, actually (or, rather, will be) because it guarantees no memory safety errors.

Anyway, thank you for your insight. I've been a professional programmer for nearly 25 years, working on large, long-running projects, some of which are very safety critical (many people would die on failure), some employing formal verification, and it is my opinion that Zig's approach to safety is at least as good as Rust's. It's certainly possible that my opinion is shaped by my personal experience. My software would have killed people either due to a buffer overflow or due to an incorrect logic. Sacrificing things that for me would increase the effort to prevent the latter only to increase my confidence that I don't have faults of the former kind from 99.99% to 99.99999999% doesn't seem like a good tradeoff.

While your opininon to the contrary is just as legitimate, barring empirical evidence, you won't be able to convince me. That the most effective approach to increasing correctness is by eliminating an important class of bugs at the significant cost of language complexity and that there is no more effective approach is an interesting hypothesis, but one that is far from being established. I understand why some might believe it to be true, and also why some believe it to be false. Ultimately, safety and correctness are central design goals for both Zig and Rust, but they each make different tradeoffs to achieve what they consider to be a good sweet spots. Not having any definitive evidence over which is "better" in that regard, we must make our languages choices based on other criteria.