I don't think Andrew is anti-Rust. But Loris, whose hn profile says he's “vp of community of the zig software foundation” is as anti-Rust as you can get: he's pathologically obsessed by Rust and spent significant amount of energy outright insulting Rust maintainers here or on Twitter (when he's not buzzy writing anti-Rust rant on his blog).
But as you say, there's no reason why Zig ought to be anti-Rust, both language are are fresh attempts at low level programming, both highly opinionated and with very different philosophies and trade offs and both language can cohabit peacefully (I've heard good things about using the Zig toolchain for cross compilation of C dependencies in rust projects, so the existence of Zig already has had a positive impact on the Rust ecosystem).
Huh, it all started with a Rust developer ceaselessly picking on Zig been memory-unsafe on social media. It would be one thing to write some technical post and be done with it but this obsession with Zig by Rust dev was infuriating to put it mildly. The same dev was very anti-Go in past and would post endless comments on Go here and elsewhere.
I used to follow pcwalton on Twitter back then (before it became a nazi bar) and that's a complete mischaracterization.
While he can get petty when talking about memory safety, he was never obsessed by Zig in any way, his tweet that ended up with Loris calling him “Coomer” among other names was a response to someone mentioning that Zig wasn't memory safe. I've never seen him mentioning Zig first on Twitter.
And on the other hand you have Loris, obsessed so much by Rust he can't help spawning in Rust threads or write dumb anti-rust rants on his blog…
(In fairness, I must say that Loris isn't even the worst offender, that title goes to M. Presler, who keeps spawning every Rust thread telling everyone who want to hear it that Zig is much better, despite having seemingly no stakes in the game (being a Java guy and having no public Zig contribution or even documented use of the langage). Sounds like the “Rust evangelical strike force” emotionally hurt a bunch of people so much they became lifetime haters).
But as you say, there's no reason why Zig ought to be anti-Rust, both language are are fresh attempts at low level programming, both highly opinionated and with very different philosophies and trade offs and both language can cohabit peacefully (I've heard good things about using the Zig toolchain for cross compilation of C dependencies in rust projects, so the existence of Zig already has had a positive impact on the Rust ecosystem).