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.
Zig is exciting to people that still actually like C. Is that a rationale choice? Not very often. Is it a wrong choice? Also again not very often. At least, not for anything in scope of a solo dev.
The industry where it seems strongest positioned is embedded. Will it actually break into that domain? No idea.
As a C veteran, Zig is interesting to me because of the compiler that still happily eats C. It has potential as a (cross!) development tool that can do a bit more than C tools alone. Which also describes Rust to some extent, but I think Rust would be more a full replacement. Which in turn is exciting because there hasn't been anything before that might replace C in my (embedded or -ish) environment.
I haven't actually tried to find out if that Zig promise is real, though. Just some trivial little things. No day job excuse and no personal projects where it would fit.
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.
kllrnohj · · focus · HN ↗
The industry where it seems strongest positioned is embedded. Will it actually break into that domain? No idea.
epolanski · · focus · HN ↗
It's the lingua franca of software development.
Zig is appealing to the "I'd like to work in a C-like system programming language but I'm not a C veteran" crowd.
Not a small crowd by any means, but will always be a niche.
a96 · · focus · HN ↗
I haven't actually tried to find out if that Zig promise is real, though. Just some trivial little things. No day job excuse and no personal projects where it would fit.