If you’re still shipping load‑bearing code in C, C++, Python, or vanilla JavaScript in 2025, you’re gambling with house money and calling it “experience.”
As systems scale, untyped or foot‑gun‑heavy languages don’t just get harder to work with—they hit a complexity cliff. Every new feature is another chance for a runtime type error or a memory bug to land in prod. Now layer LLM‑generated glue code on top of that. More code, more surface area, less anyone truly understands. In that world, “we’ll catch it in tests” is wishful thinking, not a strategy.
We don’t live in 1998 anymore. We have languages that:
- Make whole classes of bugs unrepresentable (Rust, TypeScript)
- Give you memory safety and concurrency sanity by default (Rust, Go)
- Provide static structure that both humans and LLMs can lean on as guardrails, not red tape
At this point, choosing C/C++ for safety‑critical paths, or dynamic languages for the core of a large system, isn’t just “old school.” It’s negligence with better marketing.
Use Rust, Go, or TypeScript for anything that actually matters.
Use Python/JS at the edges, for scripts and prototypes.
For production, load‑bearing paths in 2025 and beyond, anything else is you saying, out loud:
“I’m okay with avoidable runtime failures and undefined behavior in my critical systems.”
Are you?
I believe zed has extensions for c#, and I guess more importantly, dotnet.
At this point, unless you have the money to grab sublime (or specifically want foss or even just free as in beer), and you aren’t sold on the way of life of the old guard like the modern vims or emacs, zed is pretty much the best there is.
I used to be such a jetbrains guy, but that was back when they did actually have something nobody else really offered outside of Microsoft. Before that, for a good long time, I was an emacs guy, until I had to use a windows computer for work and emacs just doesn’t fit well there, couldn’t get a good equivalent of the daemon going consistently, had to switch. And to be frank, lisp is the fucking worst.
Nowadays, there are so many options though, even, or especially, on foss side. Or even just free. Hard to justify the jetbrains kinds of specialized tools, now that the same sugary, smooth experience is almost exactly achievable on those. And faster.
I have been happy with zed for quite a while now. Apart from the (disableable, thank god) first class AI stuff, I haven’t a single complaint. It feels as fast and responsive as sublime, and while the ecosystem isn’t there yet, I can get all my stacks and tooling to run currently like it was a jetbrains ide from back in the day. Rust, dotnet, deno/ts, it all just works after setup.
I would still go for sublime just for the ecosystem, but I haven’t the economics at a point where I can choose convenience for a price, if a close equivalent exists with the price of nothing but contributions occasionally. The zed source being open, even if my PRs don’t get merged, I can just live with my fork and have it natively the way I want, without working around the extension limitations.
I’m confused. I looked at zed and it’s Apache 2.0. Isn’t that open source? I do specifically want FOSS
Sorry, I go on tangents and end up just confusing people. It is! That was my point, though failed to deliver it. Gpl3, agpl and apache.
They do have a pricing model for enterprises with some proprietary extra stuff on top (shared billing, SSO, premium support and stuff like that), and a tier for expanded AI stuff (entirely ignorable, and the editor works with pretty much everything, so if you need those things, you can just set up whichever service you want yourself), but those can both be ignored, the main editor is FOSS and committed to remain so.