Projects that use Zig

2025 Dec 05

In much the same vein as my Rust post, I intend to keep a running log of Zig case studies here.

Bun

Source: Unsafe Rust vs. Zig (2023)

Bun is an alternative JS interpreter, known for substantial performance gains over V8.

After spending a lot of time practicing the dark arts in Rust, I was excited to leave unsafe Rust and learn Zig and start rewriting the project in it.

Apart from not having crazy UB like in unsafe Rust, Zig is a language that understands that you are going to be doing memory-unsafe things, so its designed and optimized around making that experience much better and less error prone. These were some key things that helped:

TigerBeetle

Source: Zig and Rust (2023)

TigerBeetle is a database. Per their docs, it is "the financial transactions database designed for mission critical safety and performance to power the next 30 years of OLTP."

Zig is a much smaller language than Rust. Although you’ll have to be able to keep the entirety of the program in your head, to control heaven and earth to not mess up resource management, doing that could be easier.

It’s not true that rewriting a Rust program in Zig would make it simpler. On the contrary, I expect the result to be significantly more complex (and segfaulty). I noticed that a lot of Zig code written in “let’s replace RAII with defer” style has resource-management bugs.

LightPanda

Source: Why We Built Lightpanda in Zig (2025)

LightPanda is a web browser.

To be honest, when I began working on Lightpanda, I chose Zig because I’m not smart enough to build a big project in C++ or Rust.

I like simple languages. I like Zig for the same reasons I like Go, C, and the KISS principle. Not just because I believe in this philosophy, but because I’m not capable of handling complicated abstractions at scale.

Ghostty

Source: We ain't afraid of no Ghostty! (2024)

Ghostty is a performant terminal emulator.

The way I’d describe it philosophically, and as a technical achievement, I have absolutely nothing but respect, and I’m impressed by Rust. I think it’s very impressive. But as a personal basis, it’s very superficial. When I write and read Rust, I’m not having fun. And I want to have fun, and part of the joy is writing the code… And it’s very much a stylistic choice.

I hate to put it in that perspective, because I think engineers want some sort of concrete, objective reason of why one versus another is better… It’s really a vanilla versus strawberry ice cream flavor sort of thing for me. They’re both great, they both are edible… But I choose one over the other. That’s really what it came down to for me.

Thoughtful posts about Zig

Thoughts on Go vs. Rust vs. Zig (2025)

I’ve collected here my impressions of the three languages I’ve experimented with lately: Go, Rust, and Zig. I’ve tried to synthesize my experience with each language into a sweeping verdict on what that language values and how well it executes on those values. This might be reductive, but, like, crystallizing a set of reductive prejudices is sort of what I’m trying to do here.