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It does seem confusing to me why someone would choose Zig. If you’re looking for a low-level language, Rust is safer with a better ecosystem. If you want a high-level language, Nim binaries are smaller and the Go ecosystem is better. When is Zig the best choice?
I would choose Zig because Zig has a much more approachable learning curve and Zig code is eminently legible compared to Rust code and it's overly complex type system.
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> I hope in the future I can use Zig as a Go replacement I've only scratched the surface of Zig myself, but my impression is that replacing Go with Zig will probably be painful in most cases. I think of the stereotypical Go project as a backend API service, where memory is relatively plentiful, and "make a copy of this string" is something you do all the time without thinking twice about it. It seems like Zig wants y…
Strings are immutable in go so they don't need to be copied? https://go.dev/play/p/o-ly05_Q46E
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There are plenty of people who love chess but hate opening theory. They look to variants such as chess960 to get their logician fix on. They also tend to love Go (the board game) and perhaps even Stratego (which has such a game tree that dwarfs the rest).
Chess was such a good example to use in this lame dichotomy that we are now pivoting to Bobby Fischer chess and completely different games.
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It does seem confusing to me why someone would choose Zig. If you’re looking for a low-level language, Rust is safer with a better ecosystem. If you want a high-level language, Nim binaries are smaller and the Go ecosystem is better. When is Zig the best choice?
I would choose Zig because Zig has a much more approachable learning curve and Zig code is eminently legible compared to Rust code and it's overly complex type system.
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> every compiler switch is a bug I totally get where this is coming from, but on the other hand it seems like Rust and Zig both get a lot of value from having the compiler understand the difference between debug and release modes, and it seems like modern C++ suffers somewhat from not having any built-in way to do something similar. The optimal number of compiler switches might not be zero.
D literally has the switches `-release` and `-debug`.
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Chess was such a good example to use in this lame dichotomy that we are now pivoting to Bobby Fischer chess and completely different games.
It's not a lame dichotomy. There are loads of people who detest rote memorization and prefer to solve only the problem directly in front of them. Bobby Fischer himself invented his variant because he hated that aspect of the game. I, personally, empathize with this position as a university student who gets higher grades in pure math courses than in the "easier" applied versions due to the memorization aspect.
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> Not fighting the borrow checker This isn't going to be appealing to Rust current users though, because “fighting the borrow checker” is a learning curve issue, you don't fight the borrow checker anymore once you've internalized its rules. > or making gratuitous copies of data to satisfy the borrow checker. You get it backward. In Rust there's less gratuitous copies, not more, because the ownership rules and the bor…
That was not my experience. I still fought the borrow checker after a year of using Rust. And I found many situations while using Rust where I either needed to clone, or use unsafe where it's easier to make a mistake than in other languages because the syntax is extremely unergonomic and the memory semantics are much less clear.
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I'm not at all trying to change your mind (I've never used Zig so I can't comment there), but just FYI: 1. Rust uses Zulip (ie, not Discord or Slack), 2. Rust doesn't lack for promising-looking, declarative/reactive UI frameworks: https://iced.rs/ , https://crates.io/crates/egui , for example.
>1. Rust uses Zulip (ie, not Discord or Slack), The official Rust chat is on Discord. Now, to Cyberdog's point, there is an IRC channel on libera (that I'm also a part of) and it's even bigger than Zig's channel, but it's "unofficial" and they did ask for an official one. Like, Zig's channel has the advantage of being a direct line to andrewrk which you won't get from the Rust channel.
Why would anyone use a new systems programming language that is not safe? Zig might be better than C in some aspects, but is it worth it to switch to Zig when you realize that it's not much safer than C? [0] [0]: https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/how-safe-is-zig/
It sounds like you're saying rust because I don't know what other languages claim both.
Rust is an awful language. That's why. If you're using a systems programming language then chances are unsafeness isn't the problem you're most concerned with
Why should I use Zig coming from Rust? It doesn't seem that Zig actually solves the memory problems that Rust does.