Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

Post by hatefulheart » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 11:57 AM UTC

p-e-w wrote: post #181

petcat wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now if that's further migrated to safe Rust, put into production & gathered feedback from lots of users, yes then you have something. Obviously they have to start somewhere if they want to get to safe rust with a considerable degree of battle testing. So they decided to start with just a transliteration and go from there. I think the Zig people are really just concerned that maybe Zig itself is a DOA language becau…

> I think the Zig people are really just concerned that maybe Zig itself is a DOA language because it doesn't offer enough over C for any serious use and their flagship project has now abandoned it. You hit the nail on the head there. Zig is 10 years old now and it’s pretty clear that the industry isn’t biting, compared to the behemoth that is Rust. Between Rust, C, and C++ there is very little room for another langu…

Post by cfiggers » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 11:59 AM UTC

p-e-w wrote: post #181

petcat wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now if that's further migrated to safe Rust, put into production & gathered feedback from lots of users, yes then you have something. Obviously they have to start somewhere if they want to get to safe rust with a considerable degree of battle testing. So they decided to start with just a transliteration and go from there. I think the Zig people are really just concerned that maybe Zig itself is a DOA language becau…

> I think the Zig people are really just concerned that maybe Zig itself is a DOA language because it doesn't offer enough over C for any serious use and their flagship project has now abandoned it. You hit the nail on the head there. Zig is 10 years old now and it’s pretty clear that the industry isn’t biting, compared to the behemoth that is Rust. Between Rust, C, and C++ there is very little room for another langu…

Post by locknitpicker » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 12:00 PM UTC

sph wrote: post #128

RetroTechie wrote: post #97

There's so much good stuff in this post. Can't help to think of a recent HN post about most AI-generated projects being abandoned within months. Why? Because value of a project is not in the code produced. It's in the amount of battle-testing that code has seen. Battle-tested, mature code > fresh rewrite. Existing Zig codebase has seen X amount of battle-testing. Rust rewrite: 0 (except -I'm assuming- passing test su…

They get abandoned because they get generated on a whim. 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 th…

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 12:00 PM UTC

busterarm wrote: post #221

simjnd wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think Zig community is triggered, I think only Zig's creator is triggered because he is afraid of people interpreting this as "Zig is unsuitable for X". I think a lot of people will, but those who do probably weren't the target audience for Zig in the first place?

Context matters. Big announcements and uninformed blog posts can kill your momentum. I still remember the Twitter dev blog where they abandoned Ruby/Rails and the damage that did. It turned out Twitter was doing a lot of stupid things and there was a mismatch of tools and their goals. They loudly blamed the tools and people ate it up because Twitter was big, visible and adored at the time. Their conclusions bypassed…

Post by brookst » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 12:01 PM UTC

shirol wrote: post #192

petcat wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now if that's further migrated to safe Rust, put into production & gathered feedback from lots of users, yes then you have something. Obviously they have to start somewhere if they want to get to safe rust with a considerable degree of battle testing. So they decided to start with just a transliteration and go from there. I think the Zig people are really just concerned that maybe Zig itself is a DOA language becau…

> Just search "segfault" on the Zig issue tracker and you'll see why people are starting to be skeptical of the future utility of such a language in the face of something like Rust. Zig has 110 open "segfault" issues [1] versus Rust's 175 open "segfault" issues [2]. So, by your logic, Rust is also bad. edit: I was just trying to point out that the parent's "just search segfault" argument is lazy. Also, Zig is still i…