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Why is Zig so cool?

nilostolte.github.io

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Re: Why is Zig so cool?

#41

Post by the__alchemist »

simonw wrote: post #8

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

For anyone not familiar: You can bundle arbitrary software as Python wheels. Can be convenient in cases like this!

Re: Why is Zig so cool?

#42

Post by BoorishBears »

crest wrote: post #39
robotresearcher wrote: post #38

> Probably the most incredible virtue of Zig compiler is its ability to compile C code. This associated with the ability to cross-compile code to be run in another architecture, different than the machine where it is was originally compiled, is already something quite different and unique. Isn't cross compilation very, very ordinary? Inline C is cool, like C has inline ASM (for the target arch). But cross-compiling?…

> Isn't cross compilation very, very ordinary? Working cross compilation out of the box any-to-any still isn't.

Yes, very rare and there is a strong cartel of companies ensuring it doesn't happen in more mainstream langs through multiple avenues to protect their interests!

From helicoptering folks onto steering committee and indoctrination of young CS majors.

Re: Why is Zig so cool?

#43

Post by brucehoult »

rvrb wrote: post #24
badtuple wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

out of curiosity, what feature do you want?

The feature I want is multimethods -- function overloading based on the runtime (not compile time) type of all the arguments.

Programming with it is magical, and its a huge drag to go back to languages without it. Just so much better than common OOP that depends only on the type of one special argument (self, this etc).

Common Lisp has had it forever, and Dylan transferred that to a language with more conventional syntax -- but is very near to dead now, certainly hasn't snowballed.

On the other hand Julia does it very well and seems to be gaining a lot of traction as a very high performance but very expressive and safe language.

Re: Why is Zig so cool?

#44

Post by fleventynine »

chrisco255 wrote: post #26
ForHackernews wrote: post #2

> 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…

I feel like the article didn't really hit on the big ones: comptime functions, no hidden control flow, elegant defaults, safe buffers, etc. 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…

> 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.

I don't think there's is any significant different here between zig, C and Rust for bare-metal code size. I can get the compiler to generate the same tiny machine code in any of these languages.

Re: Why is Zig so cool?

#46

Post by dxxvi »

There's at least 1 thing that Zig is better than Rust is that Zig compiler for Windows can be downloaded, unzipped then used without admin right. Rust needs msvc, which cannot be installed without admin right. It is said that Rust on Windows can use cygwin but I cannot make it work even with AI help.

Re: Why is Zig so cool?

#47

Post by creata »

raincole wrote: post #7
ForHackernews wrote: post #2

> 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…

> One may wonder how the compiler discovers the variable type. The type in this case is *inferred* by the initialization. That the author feels the need to emphasize this means either that they haven't paid attention to modern languages for a very long time, or this article is for people who haven't paid attention to modern languages for a very long time. Type inference has left academy and proliferated into mainstre…

> Type inference has left academy and proliferated into mainstream languages for so many years that I almost forgot that it's a worth mentioning feature.

I'm not even sure I'd call this type inference (other people definitely do call it type inference) given that it's only working in one direction. Even Java (var) and C23 (auto), the two languages the author calls out, have that. It's much less convenient than something like Hindley-Milner.

Re: Why is Zig so cool?

#48

Post by crabmusket »

didip wrote: post #20

Is it cool? It seems to be in nether land between Rust and Go. Not sure what is the unique use case for Zig.

As far as I can tell from my outsider perspective, Rust might be used instead of C++, Zig instead of C, and Go instead of Java.

Re: Why is Zig so cool?

#49

Post by elSidCampeador »

simonw wrote: post #8

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

For this sort of stuff I find micromamba / pixi a better way of managing packages, as oppposed to the pip / uv family of tools

Re: Why is Zig so cool?

#50

Post by garbagepatch »

meisel wrote: post #25

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?

Regarding runtime overhead, I'd assume you would still need an io implementation, it is just showing it to you explicitly instead of it being hidden behind the std lib.

For simple projects where you don't want to pass it around in function parameters, you can create a global object with one implementation and use it from everywhere.

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