There's a change in the tradeoffs in the above scenario:
- you still get extra benefit from Rust, but the magnitude of the benefit is reduced (e.g., no UAF without F).
- you still get extra drawbacks from Rust, but the magnitude of drawbacks is increased, as Rust generally punishes you for not allocating (boxing is a common escape hatch to avoid complex lifetimes).
Just how much tradeoff is shifted is hard to qualify unambiguously, but, from my PoV (Rust since 2015, TB/Zig since late 2022), Zig was and is the right choice in this context.
- you still get extra benefit from Rust, but the magnitude of the benefit is reduced (e.g., no UAF without F).
- you still get extra drawbacks from Rust, but the magnitude of drawbacks is increased, as Rust generally punishes you for not allocating (boxing is a common escape hatch to avoid complex lifetimes).
Just how much tradeoff is shifted is hard to qualify unambiguously, but, from my PoV (Rust since 2015, TB/Zig since late 2022), Zig was and is the right choice in this context.