this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2026
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Rust
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This is probably not worth losing sleep over. OpenAI are not the only Platinum Member, nor the biggest contributor to the Rust Foundation. Microsoft and Google have both contributed at least $1 million each, going by previous press releases. See here for a list of the foundation members
Also, Foundation members have no say on the direction of the language.
I think in terms of policies and politics, Zig has a much better and sustainable future
How so?
It's independant and less biased. Rust has really fallen into drama and also political stuff with megacorps. Rust definitely has a firm place for future, but I would say Rust is more similar to java and Zig is more similar to C in that manner.
Unless you put stake into right-wing ideologues who hate Rust because it has many cat girl developers, there is no drama. And for the record, you shouldn't, the hate peddlers make your life worse.
And great proof that Rust is free and independent is the fact that they still (carefully) do breaking changes (e.g. the slow rollout of the never type). If the corporate world would dictate its development, it'd never break existing code.
There was the Rust Talk Reflections Drama...
Zig is a much smaller community and has already had some drama. You can't magically avoid it. All communities of a sufficient size have drama.
It might be true that Rust has a bit more drama because of the high concentration of "cat girls" as flying_sheep put it, but I don't think there's enough data to really say. Also I wouldn't be surprised if Zig attracts similar characters given its closely related goals.
You're gonna have to elaborate on that… How so?
I think I did! Rust has lots of corporate and political backing from big companies and political/security firms (FBI, pentagon etc) and zig is more free and has less governance and backing, less politics involved.
C was literally created by AT&T for unix and pushed into POSIX and enforced as a standard.
C is as corporate as it gets.
Those companies and firms back Rust because it's memory safe without a garbage collector, and great for general purpose programming or systems programming. That's super important for everyone, but especially large companies working on high performance or mission critical software.
Zig is not memory safe so it's a non-starter for these things, and has not proven itself in the industry anywhere near what Rust has.
This has nothing to do with Rust being "corporate" or anything wrong with Rust.
Don't these companies and firms get more power in steering and forming the future, features and efforts of the rust project?
Like @OP said:
Nope!
As long as it's just receiving money it's whatever, we have lots of corporate sponsorship in the Linux kernel and in other components we use every day for computing. I wouldn't move to a different kernel/OS just because I agreed on some ideological stuff with their makers.