Zig is hard but worth it
ratfactor.com
Zig is hard but worth it
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Re: Zig is hard but worth it
#2Re: Zig is hard but worth it
#3> Crucially, there is basically no documentation for the standard library except for the source code itself.
From the viewpoint of someone learning about a new language, I find the accessibility of the standard libraries goes a long way toward helping me understand how things fit together. It is a first stop to see how experts in the language use it. Browsing through the standard libraries of languages like Zig, Go, and Python - they're usually well-documented and readable enough to be a tutorial, even before you've dug into learning it. Others (Rust, C++) are a bit more, ah, technical for the novice.
Re: Zig is hard but worth it
#4> there’s not a direct correlation between the slimness of a language’s syntax and ease of learning
That's absolutely true, but (the standard library aside) the "syntax" -- or, rather the syntax and core semantics -- of a programming language are arbitrary axiomatic rules, while everything else is derivable from those axioms. So while it is true that a small language can lead to a not-necessarily-easy-to-learn overall programming experience, it is the only arbitrary part, and so the only part you need to memorise (or consult the documentation for when dealing with some subtlety you may have forgotten). So a smaller language reduces the need for "language lawyering" after you learn it.
Some languages (e.g. lisps) are deceptively small by relying on macros that form a "second-order" language that interacts with the "first-order" language, but Zig doesn't have that. It has only one language level, which is small and easy to memorise.
But yes, Zig is a bigger language than C, but a far smaller language than C++. What's amazing, though, is that C++ is strictly more expressive than C (i.e. there are programs that could grow exponentially faster in C than in C++, at least without the help of C macros), but Zig is as expressive as C++ (i.e. program sizes may differ by no more than a small constant factor) while being much closer to C in size, and it achieves that without the use of macros.
Re: Zig is hard but worth it
#5From the article:
> Easy is subjective. But simple things are simple because they do not complicate; they have fewer concepts. Simple is objective.
I'd argue both are subjective, or with a better word: relative.
I'd say Zig is easier and simpler than C in almost all regards. The article does not specify what Zig is compared to in order to make these statements. Probably the author had C in mind, but that was not explicitly mentioned.
Re: Zig is hard but worth it
#6Where do you guys see good use cases for Zig? I'm intrigued by the language but don't really have any good ideas on where to try it out.
I thought about trying it out in as small data engineering project, but I'm not sure if language support is sufficient for the kind of tooling I would need eg. Database adapters.
Re: Zig is hard but worth it
#7I get what Zig is going for in making all operations as explicit as possible, but I fear that it's going to turn away fields like graphics and game development where it would be a good fit except for the lack of operator overloading forcing you to go back to C-style math function spaghetti. It's all fun and games until what should be a straightforward math expression turns into 8 nested function calls.
Re: Zig is hard but worth it
#8> Crucially, there is basically no documentation for the standard library except for the source code itself. From the viewpoint of someone learning about a new language, I find the accessibility of the standard libraries goes a long way toward helping me understand how things fit together. It is a first stop to see how experts in the language use it. Browsing through the standard libraries of languages like Zig, Go,…
Rust has the standard library documentation at https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/ or on your local computer, if there's really nothing like that for Zig I think that's a problem. Are you sure there's no `info zig` or something like that?
Re: Zig is hard but worth it
#9My main issue with Zig is that I’m scared to invest time in writing something nontrivial to see the community/adoption flounder then regret not using Rust or C++ later
The language itself is fun. The explicit-ness of choosing how allocation is done feels novel, and comptime is a clean solution for problems that are ugly in most languages.
Aside from lack of community I’d say the biggest nuisance is error handling in nearly everything including allocations. I get that allocation can fail but the vast majority of programs I write, I just want to panic on an allocation failure (granted these aren’t production programs…)
Edit: in retrospect, allocator error handling verbosity is probably necessary due to the power the language gives you in choosing allocators. If I use the general purpose allocator then my edge case is PC out of memory; if I use a fixed buffer allocator, a failed allocation is a code bug or a common error case, so we might want to handle the failed allocation and recover
Re: Zig is hard but worth it
#10> there’s not a direct correlation between the slimness of a language’s syntax and ease of learning That's absolutely true, but (the standard library aside) the "syntax" -- or, rather the syntax and core semantics -- of a programming language are arbitrary axiomatic rules, while everything else is derivable from those axioms. So while it is true that a small language can lead to a not-necessarily-easy-to-learn overal…
I'm not a Zig expert, but I have a different take here.
Zig has comptime, which is essentially a compile time macro written in the main language and with type reflection capabilities.
They can introduce complex behaviour and fail in very cryptic and unexpected ways, which results in an experience very similar to macros or C++ template literals.