Why is Zig so cool?

Post by tamnd » Sat, Nov 08, 2025, 3:17 PM UTC

grayhatter wrote: post #334

tamnd wrote: post #324

Zig is so cool, but C is cooler. I like how Zig feels clear and simple to start with. I like that it gives one toolchain and makes cross compilation easy. I like that it helps people see how systems programming can feel approachable again. I also like that C has done these things for many years. I can use different tools, link libraries, and trust that it will still work. I can depend on standards that keep improving…

I've used for well oven a year now, and I identify with this comment... well no, but I used to. In between Zig, and another language I enjoy was Python, and it was breath of fresh air to come back to the C style that I know and love within Zig. I would have said exactly this, when I first started writing Zig. Today, Zig is so much better than C. I used to refer to Zig as an improved version of C. But I don't anymore.…

    char8_t* s = u8"こんにちは";
    char16_t* t = u"Привет";
    char32_t* ustr = U"你好";

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Nov 08, 2025, 3:17 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #328

1718627440 wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mostly write C, but yes even a simple call to e.g. malloc has different semantics in C++ (you need to cast).

Proper C++ should use new , delete , custom allocators, and standard collection types. Even better, all heap allocations should be done via ownership types. Calling into malloc () is writing C in C++, and should only be used for backwards compatibility with existing C code. Additionally there is no requirement on the C++ standard that new and delete call into malloc() / free() , that is usually done as a matter of co…

Post by johnisgood » Sat, Nov 08, 2025, 3:19 PM UTC

flohofwoe wrote: post #243

johnisgood wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As much as I dislike Rust, I gotta give it credit where it's due. It has something unique: a borrow checker. What is so unique in Zig?

> It has something unique: a borrow checker. Rust's borrow checker isn't unique either but was inspired by Cylone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclone_(programming_language) IMHO a programming language doesn't need a single USP, it just needs to include good existing ideas and (more importantly) exclude bad existing ideas (of course what's actually a good and bad idea is highly subjective, that's why we need many p…

Post by pjmlp » Sat, Nov 08, 2025, 3:21 PM UTC

dragonelite wrote: post #292

badtuple wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was also curious what direction the article was going to take. The showcase is cool, and the features you mentioned are cool. But for me, Zig is cool is because all the pieces simply fit together with essentially no redundancy or overloading. You learn the constructs and they just compose as you expect. There's one feature I'd personally like added, but there's nothing actually _missing_. Coding in it quickly felt…

Having spend a year tinkering in zig and it's absence of features has made me want to drop c#/java professionally and pick up Golang. Its quiet annoying when you see a codebases written in C#/java and you can tell in which year/era it was written because of the language features. The way of writing things in C# changes like every 4 years or so. There's a certain beauty in only having to know 1~2 loops/iteration conce…

Post by zbentley » Sat, Nov 08, 2025, 3:24 PM UTC

rurban wrote: post #317

zbentley wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are perl5’s BEGIN blocks equivalent to comptime? It’s been awhile, but I recall BEGIN blocks executing at require time—which, in complicated pre-forking setups that had to be careful about only requiring certain modules later during program execution because they did dumb things like opening connections when loaded, meant that reasoning about BEGIN blocks required a lot more careful thought than reasoning about c…

BEGIN blocks execute at compile-time. require is just a wrapper to load a module at compile-time. When you want to use state, like openening a file for run-time, use INIT blocks instead. These are executed first before runtime, after compile-time. My perl compiler dumps the state of the program after compile-time. So everything executed in BEGIN blocks is already evaluated. Opening a file in BEGIN would not open it l…