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What Zig felt like, coming from Rust

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  1. plqbfbv · · focus · HN ↗
    Maybe I'm not that deep into programming, but I don't understand the hype about Zig?

    I programmed in rust a bit and can't say I'm an expert, but in my view rust mostly-solved the memory management problem at compile time and without a GC, and it works very well. The biggest con and cost I've always seen repeated so far is that "it's slow to compile", and I get that, if you're past 250 crates the final --release link tends to become noticeable, but there were improvements to incremental compilation.

    On the other hand - looking at the syntax from this post - Zig feels a blend of javascript, python and golang syntax that still requires memory management. So a nicer-written C that inherits all the issues from C? From the post: no functional programming, data mutation, memory leak, double-free, memory corruption.

    Personally I'd rather trade a couple minutes of final link every time when this is the other option.

    1. qudat · · focus · HN ↗
      As someone who primarily writes in TS, Go, Python, I agree with your assessment: it looks like those languages. The reason I like Go is the reason I like Zig: the language is relatively simple and feels like C.

      The C interop is a huge win as someone who wants to do more posix/wayland projects.

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