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Zen-C: Write like a high-level language, run like C

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11–20 of 159 posts

Re: Zen-C: Write like a high-level language, run like C

#11
post #2

Am I the only one who saw this syntax and immediately though "Man, this looks almost identical to Rust with a few slight variations"?

It seems to just be Rust for people who are allergic to using Rust. It looks like a fun project, but I'm not sure what this adds to the point where people would actually use it over C or just going to Rust.

> what this adds

I guess the point is what is subtracts, instead - answer being the borrow-checker.

Re: Zen-C: Write like a high-level language, run like C

#14
An interesting bit to me is that it compiles to (apparently) readable C, I'm not sure how one would use that to their advantage

I am not too familiar with C - is the idea that it's easier to incrementally have some parts of your codebase in this language, with other parts being in regular C?

Re: Zen-C: Write like a high-level language, run like C

#16
post #5

Initial commit was 24h ago, 363 stars, 20 forks already. Man, this goes fast.

Could be bots.

Definitely could be, but the dev has been posting updates on Twitter for a while now. It could be just some amount of hype they have built.

Re: Zen-C: Write like a high-level language, run like C

#17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to just be Rust for people who are allergic to using Rust. It looks like a fun project, but I'm not sure what this adds to the point where people would actually use it over C or just going to Rust.

> what this adds I guess the point is what is subtracts, instead - answer being the borrow-checker.

So it re-adds manual lifetime checking. Got it.

Re: Zen-C: Write like a high-level language, run like C

#19

Why not compile to rust or assembly? C seems like an odd choice. In fact why not simply write rust to begin with?

Assembly requires way more work than compiling to, say C. Clang and gcc do a lot of the heavy lifting regarding optimisation, spilling values to the stack, etc
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