Rust Is Great. We Chose Zig Anyway.
Why Tickoni rejected Rust's ownership model, refused to settle for C, and built its financial infrastructure in Zig. The programming language debate is usually about which language has the best features. We had a slightly different problem: we want to ship an actual system. Every few years, systems programming discovers a new religion. C is too dangerous. C++ is too complicated. Rust will save us from memory bugs. The borrow checker is the future. Rewrite everything. Preferably yesterday. And look, some of those arguments are legitimate. Rust is an extraordinary piece of engineering. Its ownership model eliminates entire categories of bugs. Its type system is powerful. Its tooling is excellent. But there's a question that rarely gets enough attention in these debates: What happens when your application doesn't actually own most of the memory it's working with? Not theoretically. Not in some carefully constructed benchmark. In a real application talking to decades of e...