21–30 of 527 posts
Is it cool? It seems to be in nether land between Rust and Go. Not sure what is the unique use case for Zig.
https://tigerbeetle.com/blog/2025-10-25-synadia-and-tigerbee...
Is it cool? It seems to be in nether land between Rust and Go. Not sure what is the unique use case for Zig.
I totally vibe with the intro but then the rest of the article goes on to be a showcase bits of zig. I feel what is missing is how each feature is so cool compared to other languages. As a language nerd zig syntax is just so cool. It doesn’t feel the need to adhere to any conventions and seems to solve the problems in the most direct and simple way. An example of this declaring a label and referring to a label. By mo…
Zig's big feature imo is just the relative absence of warts in the core language. I really don't know how to communicate that in an article. You kind of just have to build something in it.
I totally vibe with the intro but then the rest of the article goes on to be a showcase bits of zig. I feel what is missing is how each feature is so cool compared to other languages. As a language nerd zig syntax is just so cool. It doesn’t feel the need to adhere to any conventions and seems to solve the problems in the most direct and simple way. An example of this declaring a label and referring to a label. By mo…
I was also curious what direction the article was going to take. The showcase is cool, and the features you mentioned are cool. But for me, Zig is cool is because all the pieces simply fit together with essentially no redundancy or overloading. You learn the constructs and they just compose as you expect. There's one feature I'd personally like added, but there's nothing actually _missing_. Coding in it quickly felt…
> I can’t think of any other language in my 45 years long career that surprised more than Zig. I can easily say that Zig is not only a new programming language, but it’s a totally new way to write programs, in my opinion. To say it’s merely a language to replace C or C++, it’s a huge understatement. I don't understand how the things presented in this article are surprising. Zig has several nice features shared by man…
What Zig really does is make systems programming more accessible. Rust is great, but its guarantees of memory safety come with a learning curve that demands mastering lifetimes and generics and macros and a complex trait system. Zig is in that class of programming languages like C, C++, and Rust, and unlike Golang, C#, Java, Python, JS, etc that have built-in garbage collection.
The explicit control flow allows you as a developer to avoid some optimizations done in Rust (or common in 3rd party libraries) that can bloat binary sizes. This means there's no target too small for the language, including embedded systems. It also means it's a good choice if you want to create a system that maximizes performance by, for example, preventing heap allocations altogether.
The built-in C/C++ compiler and language features for interacting with C code easily also ensures that devs have access to a mature ecosystem despite the language being young.
My experience with Zig so far has been pleasurable. The main downside to the language has been the churn between minor versions (language is still pre-1.0 so makes perfect sense, but still). That being said, I like Zig's new approach to explicit async I/O that parallels how the language treats Allocators. It feels like the correct way to do it and allows developers again the flexibility to control how async and concurrency is handled (can choose single-threaded event loop or multi-threaded pool quite easily).
For a language that’s so low level and performance focused, I’m surprised that it has those extra io and allocator arguments to functions. Isn’t that creating code bloat and runtime overhead?
for IO, which is new and I have not actually used yet, here are some relevant paragraphs:
The new Io interface is non-generic and uses a vtable for dispatching function calls to a concrete implementation. This has the upside of reducing code bloat, but virtual calls do have a performance penalty at runtime. In release builds the optimizer can de-virtualize function calls but it’s not guaranteed.
...
A side effect of proposal #23367, which is needed for determining upper bound stack size, is guaranteed de-virtualization when there is only one Io implementation being used (also in debug builds!).
I've tried writing a similar post, but I think it's a bit difficult to sound convincing when talking about why Zig is so pleasant. it's really not any one thing. it's a culmination of a lot of well made, pragmatic decisions that don't sound significant on their own. they just culminate in a development experience that feels pleasantly unique. a few of those decisions seem radical, and I often disagreed with them.. bu…
A neat little thing I like about Zig is one of the options for installing it is via PyPI like this: https://pypi.org/project/ziglang/ pip install ziglang Which means you don't even have to install it separately to try it out via uvx. If you have uv installed already try this: cd /tmp echo '#include int main() { printf("Hello, World!"); return 0; }' > hello.c uvx --from ziglang python-zig cc /tmp/hello.c ./a.out