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.
The main advantage of Zig for me and many other programmers, is the simple mental model you need to keep while reading the code. All control flow is expressed by keywords, never symbols. That along makes code much more readable. There is nothing like Rust macros, things can't do "magic. Zig comptime are regular functions, so you can clearly see and follow the trail. There are no exceptions, no recoverable panics, all code will run linearly as you see it written. Error handling in Zig is close to perfect, in my view. Obviously, Zig is not a language to use for high-level jobs. It makes no sense to write CRUD web app in Zig, you will be fighting the resource management for no good reason. For me personally, I feel that I'm too stupid to use Rust effectively. I started moving away from C++ purely because I don't want to deal with exceptions. And Rust is just a more complex C++ with memory safety.
plqbfbv · · focus · HN ↗
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.
lukaslalinsky · · focus · HN ↗