Zig is not cool. It's a mediocre new language, missing key features needed for industrial development, like destructors or overall memory safety. But for some reason it's overhyped.
Why is Zig so cool?
261–270 of 527 posts
Re: Why is Zig so cool?
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
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I use Lua in 2025, it’s brilliant. By the way, so does everyone using neovim.
See also Roblox (and there used to be a whole bunch of game engines that had Lua scripting but I -think- most of them have switched to "NIH!" scripting engines?)
Re: Why is Zig so cool?
#263[1] https://research.google/pubs/secure-by-design-googles-perspe...
[2] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/msrc/blog/2019/07/we-need-a-...
Re: Why is Zig so cool?
#264Re: Why is Zig so cool?
#265While some of the features the author references are really interesting, personally I don't see how any of that would justify creating a new memory unsafe language in 2016. I thought it was pretty obvious by now [1][2][3] memory safety is best left to tooling / compilers and not to programmers. [1] https://research.google/pubs/secure-by-design-googles-perspe... [2] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/msrc/blog/2019/07/we…
Re: Why is Zig so cool?
#266I'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…
Re: Why is Zig so cool?
#267I'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…
> Zig is not only a new programming language, but it’s a totally new way to write programs I'd say the same thing about Rust. I find it the best way to express when what code should run at any given point in the program and the design is freakin interstellar: It is basically a "query engine" where you write a query of some code against the entire available "code space" including root crate and its dependencies. Once…
Re: Why is Zig so cool?
#268For 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?
Don’t know. That’s how people usually get rid of repeat arguments (or OOP constructor).
Re: Why is Zig so cool?
#269While some of the features the author references are really interesting, personally I don't see how any of that would justify creating a new memory unsafe language in 2016. I thought it was pretty obvious by now [1][2][3] memory safety is best left to tooling / compilers and not to programmers. [1] https://research.google/pubs/secure-by-design-googles-perspe... [2] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/msrc/blog/2019/07/we…
This sound a bit like Tanenbaum's rejection of Torvals' project, because monolithic kernels are obsolete.
Fortunately, vendors are gradually moving away from Linux, having been hamstrung by its failures. Google is planning to move to a capability-based microkernel in the coming years for Android and ChromeOS, and Huawei has already done so with HarmonyOS.
In a hundred years, Linux will be a footnote in computing history.
Re: Why is Zig so cool?
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
> C/C++ It has been several decades since putting a slash between these two made sense, lumping them together like this. It would be similar to saying something like Java/Scala or ObjectiveC/Swift. These are completely different languages.
Nope, that is a English grammar construct that is a shortcut for "and" and "or", as any good English grammar book will explain. Indeed you see those for Java/Scala and Objective-C/Swift in technical books and job adverts. Any search on the careers sites, or documentation, on companies that have seats at ISO, sell/develop C and C++ compilers, have such C/C++ references in a couple of places. Do you need any example?