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What Zig felt like, coming from Rust

282 points · 351 comments · ksec

  1. gslepak · · focus · HN ↗
    I'm honestly baffled why people are writing Zig or Rust and avoiding V. V (and now Bend) seems like the future to me.
    1. myko · · focus · HN ↗
      I haven't heard of those, but I've used Zig and Rust for some projects

      What's the pitch?

      1. ModernMech · · focus · HN ↗
        The V pitch was a bunch of features that seemed implausible like automatic C++ translation and near-GC ergonomics with near-manual-memory behavior, without Rust-style explicit lifetime annotations or pervasive reference counting. so basically the pitch was the holy grail of systems, which caused drama as the project was met with extreme skepticism.

        That was 7 years ago and since then the project has not delivered the grail, instead settling to be more of a mashup between go and C.

        Bend is completely different it was just announced last week. It doesn’t have any users and has a weird ai integration so I done see how it’s relevant as a contender in the systems space at all.

        1. irwt · · focus · HN ↗
          Also the creator of Bend is... lets just say he doesn't stick to projects for long.
    2. altairprime · · focus · HN ↗
      Such bafflement is often a medium-strength signal of the Bystander Effect. If someone wrote and submitted to HN your own blog post comparing the Zig/Rust examples from this article to ones from V, I’d read it in its entirety knowing nothing whatsoever about V. Perhaps it will be written by you!
    3. a96 · · focus · HN ↗
      Never heard of them. V looks neat in some ways, but there's still no 1.0, installation tells you to compile the compiler form source and it still uses and depends on a C compiler behind it. And defaults to GC. That's a ton of reasons why various people would drop it on sight. Also, inertia, of course.

      Zig suffers from much of those, as does Nim. Rust OTOH appears well integrated and stable and I'm even seeing a lot of corporate use. I'd love to see V get to that level as well. But seems it's not even here in the present, let alone the future.

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