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Why is Zig so cool?

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Re: Why is Zig so cool?

#131

Post by jibal »

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…

And it's not caught in ReleaseFast builds ... which is not at all unique to Zig (although Zig does do many innovative things to catch errors in debug builds).

Re: Why is Zig so cool?

#132

Post by jibal »

sarchertech wrote: post #51
raincole wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. It’s not common in lower level languages without garbage collectors or languages focused on compilation speed.

That's true if the only lower level languages one considers are C and assembler. Virtually every other language has moved way beyond that.

Re: Why is Zig so cool?

#133

Post by jibal »

sarchertech wrote: post #102
jolux wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compilation speed — OCaml, Go, D, C#, Java “Low-level” languages — Rust, C++, D

I meant for focused on compilation speed to apply only to lower level languages. And when I say lower level I don’t really include D because it has a garbage collector (I know it’s optional but much of the standard library uses it I believe).

That a language has a garbage collector is completely orthogonal to whether it has type inference ... what the heck does it matter what "much of the standard library uses" to this issue? It's pure sophism. Even C now has type inference. The plain fact is that the claim is wrong.

Re: Why is Zig so cool?

#134

Post by uecker »

newpavlov wrote: post #76
mlavergn wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it's insanely simple, insanely fast, often more performant than Rust with lower resource usage, with first class C-interop and cross-compiling out of the box. It's easily my favorite language now, with Go being a close second. Both are opinionated and have a standard formatter that makes Zig code instantly readable when you see it, similar to Go. Rust was once interesting, but it's firmly in macro hell territor…

>often more performant than Rust with lower resource usage [citation needed] If we are to trust this page [0] Rust beats Zig on most benchmarks. In the Techempower benchmarks [1] Rust submissions dominate the TOP, while Zig is... quite far. Several posts which I've seen in the past about Zig beating Rust by 3x or such all turned to be based on low quality Rust code with some performance pitfalls like measuring perfor…

I would say in most submission-based benchmarks among languages that should perform similar, this mostly reflects the size and enthusiasm of the community.

Re: Why is Zig so cool?

#135

Post by jibal »

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…

Zig's generics cause bloat just like any other language with generics--explicit flow control has nothing to do with it.

Zig is a good language. So are Rust, D, Nim, and a bunch of others. People tend to think that the ones they know about are better than all the rest because they don't know about the rest and are implicitly or explicitly comparing their language to C.

Re: Why is Zig so cool?

#136

Post by bragr »

MrJohz wrote: post #97
qouteall wrote: post #70

In my opinion the biggest issue of Zig is that it doesn't allow attaching data to error. The error can only be passed via side channel, which is inconvenient and ENOURAGES TOOL DEVELOPERS TO NOT PASS ERROR DATA, which greatly increase debugging difficulty. Somethings there are 100 things that possibly go wrong. With error data you can easily know which exact thing is wrong. But with error code you just know "somethin…

Interestingly, I just read an article from matklad (who works a lot with Zig) talking about the benefits of splitting up error codes and error diagnostics, and the pattern of using a diagnostic sync to provide human-readable diagnostic information: https://matklad.github.io/2025/11/06/error-codes-for-control... Honestly I was quite convinced by that, because it kind of matches my own experiences that, even when using…

Your and GP's two statements are not mutually exclusive. This paradigm can have significant benefits, and at the same time be too cumbersome for people to want to use consistently.

Re: Why is Zig so cool?

#137

Post by tcfhgj »

krosaen wrote: post #92

I like the idea of the `defer `keyword - you can have automatic cleanup at the end of the scope but you have to make it obvious you are doing so, no hidden execution of anything (unlike c++ destructors).

But you can forget it, unlike C++ destructors

Re: Why is Zig so cool?

#138

Post by NoteyComplexity »

d3Xt3r wrote: post #61

Is there a decent native GUI library for Zig yet? I don't want to use bloated toolkits like GTK and Qt. I like the simplicity and speed of Rust's eGUI. Something similar for Zig would be amazing.

Is dvui something you want to see? Although the use of backends are still c based, the core part of the gui seems written fully in zig rather than a binding from a c library.

https://github.com/david-vanderson/dvui

Re: Why is Zig so cool?

#140

Post by [deleted] »

phplovesong wrote: post #112
unscaled wrote: post #93

I'm afraid this article kinda fails at at its job. It starts out with a very bold claim ("Zig is not only a new programming language, but it’s a totally new way to write programs"), but ends up listing a bunch of features that are not unique to Zig or even introduced by Zig: type inference (Invented in the late 60s, first practically implemented in the 80s), anonymous structs (C#, Go, Typescript, many ML-style langua…

Agreed. But i would not put comptime as some sort of magical invention. Its still just a newish take on meta programming. We had that since forever. From my minimal time with Zig i kind of think comptime as a better version of c++ templates. That said Zig is possibly a better alternative to c++, but not that exiting for me. I kind of dont get why so many think its the holy grail, first it was rust, and now zig.

[deleted]
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