I thought Zig would be simpler and Rust harder. After building the same project in both, I learned that language simplicity doesn't matter when the tooling fights you at every step.

The two places your data lives, how they differ, and the use-after-free bug that taught me why it matters.

How I learned that Zig's HashMap stores pointers, not data, and why that creates use-after-free bugs if you're not careful.