A Rust Developer's Honest Take After Rewriting a Project in Zig

A developer with seven years of Rust experience documented their first hands-on encounter with Zig by reimplementing an existing Rust project, jsonpath-rust, as zig-jsonpath. One immediate friction point was the limited IDE support in Zig compared to the rich tooling available for Rust, which pushed the developer toward CLI-based workflows. Surprisingly, this constraint proved refreshing, ultimately prompting a broader shift away from full IDEs toward a lightweight terminal setup. The developer also noted that Zig encouraged a notably flatter project file structure, reducing the need for deep directory hierarchies that Rust projects often require. Testing approaches between the two languages appeared similar on paper, but Zig's verbosity and flat structure introduced new organizational trade-offs that required explicit configuration in the build system.