Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

I don't care what Anthropic says and what the CEOs buy, I care about my own output and the recent models give me 2x uplift easily, I'd say 10x in single digit percentage of the time and I know I'm not using them to their full potential. We're living in an era of mass produced software. You can still be an artisan in this era, but you have to be aware.

What Java, JS, Python and C# all did to conquer the industry from a C++ dominance was to provide safety harnesses for less "perfectionist" workers to fumble around without causing a mess, to write C and C++ in an increasingly hostile world we realized you needed a lot of craftsmanship, the performance benefits outdid and kept the latter languages relevant for a long while.

Still, the performance/predictability penalty didn't give way so Rust (and Swift) came into play. They don't have as many unpredictable performance characteristics as the previously "safe" GC languages but still provided more or less the same guarantees (in some ways perhaps even better for Rust).

The brilliance of the Rust ideas did start a bit of a cambrian explosion of languages in that niche, most of them however targeting a bit more of a craftsman position than Rust (that came out of distinct industry needs).

The problem as the article illustrates, in car terms.

If Java,JS,etc are mostly "regular safe cars" and C/C++ a two wheel motorcycle.

Rust is perhaps a rally car (fast but still a car so occupants inside are well protected) whilst Zig really is a quadbike or open wheel cart, not as unsafe as a two wheel bike since you won't slide for the smallest oil/ice patch but flipping over is still dangerous as hell.

And that takes us to the crux, so many developers who love the craft and perfection (and don't live under- or perhaps care of- financial constraints) think that "good careful" developers is all that's needed and don't see dangerous language designs as a problem.

I'm an older developer, and given that I can write "good careful code", but 90% of the time it's also a matter of time and financial constraints so I wouldn't trust mine (or anyone elses for that matter) code written under those "industry" conditions.

I think Zig has a lot of nice perks, but it was obvious from day 1 that it's very much for people that love their hacking freedom over writing code for todays hostile world.

Sunk cost fallacy can be a feature: if you have spent a lot of blood, sweat, and tears on a project, you are more likely to push it through adversity and the doldrums that inevitably one will encounter. If all it took was one of those momentarily brilliant ideas and a prompt on Claude to produce something, there is no attachment whatsoever to it.

Speaking as the ‘average programmer’, I have dozens of brilliant ideas per day that don’t stand the test of time or scrutiny, and the very few that pass the filter don’t seem that interesting days later, or worth the effort at all.

Ideas have always been cheap. Now, proof of concepts have become as cheap. I don’t care about your Show HN unless you have spent a month on it.

Other than JS (which they obviously do prefer), this rewrite would have taken place no matter what programming language was originally used for Bun.

The reason for the rewrite was marketing, not engineering. The justification after the fact can be done no matter what language they were rewriting from.

Zig -> Rust : "We had all these memory errors"

Rust -> Zig : "We had poor iteration due to compile times"

Java -> Anything : "Memory is at a premium when we're trying to run a fleet of agents"

Anything -> JS : "We wanted a single language to optimise our agents for"

You get the idea.