Zig has some advantages for such projects, especially in the beginning.
Among them:
- much easier to iterate on (due to the language being simpler and compilation much faster)
- native C/C++ interops (Zig can compile C and C++ and mix it with Zig) which is crucial for a node-replacement runtime that runs an open source JS engine
- fewer dependencies and trivial static linking
I guess that now that they've been acquired by Anthropic there's this combination of having both in-house Rust talent, AI which does better on Rust, and the funding and resources necessary to undertake such a migration.
Also: Anthropic bought Bun to not depend on node.js. But now they are dependent on Zig which is a moving target and is hostile to them because not accepting their contributions.
Among them:
- much easier to iterate on (due to the language being simpler and compilation much faster)
- native C/C++ interops (Zig can compile C and C++ and mix it with Zig) which is crucial for a node-replacement runtime that runs an open source JS engine
- fewer dependencies and trivial static linking
I guess that now that they've been acquired by Anthropic there's this combination of having both in-house Rust talent, AI which does better on Rust, and the funding and resources necessary to undertake such a migration.