Zig 0.16.0 Release Notes • Hacker News Board

Re: Zig 0.16.0 Release Notes

#41

Post by ksec » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 6:25 PM UTC

baranul wrote: post #35

ksec wrote: post #18

I/O, Linked, Incremental Compilation. Apart from 0.17 being a short release cycle. I wonder how many more releases before 1.0? Are we looking at 0.20, another one and half year of baking?

It's strange, because it has been over 10 years now. To get to 0.20, seems like it would be another 2 to 3 years. The weirdest thing is how Zig continuously gets a pass for being "almost there", for around 5 years now. An argument could be made that why it's taking so long is about the language's BDFL wanting the freedom to continually make breaking changes. As it is, they got another bewildering pass for sweeping 3,…

I honestly dont see it as an issue. At least not for now. You could have languages or software released as 1.0 at any time but they are not finished or ready for it. Arguably Crystal is a bit like that.

Or you end up like NIM which they are on 3rd or 4th version already.

And frankly speaking, a lot of people took to Wiki and said it has been 10 years, in reality Andrew only started working on it full time in 2018, and had a year off due to other personal issues, and then COVID hit. Together It is more like 6 years than 10.

Re: Zig 0.16.0 Release Notes

#42

Post by geon » Sat, Apr 18, 2026, 9:12 AM UTC

slopinthebag wrote: post #12

Have they said how many breaking changes requiring a rewrite Zig will be going through before it stabilises? Also I thought Zig doesn't have interfaces....how does the IO one work?

Breaking changes don't require a rewrite.

Re: Zig 0.16.0 Release Notes

#43

Post by lerno » Mon, Apr 20, 2026, 10:09 AM UTC

mk12 wrote: post #38

baranul wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's strange, because it has been over 10 years now. To get to 0.20, seems like it would be another 2 to 3 years. The weirdest thing is how Zig continuously gets a pass for being "almost there", for around 5 years now. An argument could be made that why it's taking so long is about the language's BDFL wanting the freedom to continually make breaking changes. As it is, they got another bewildering pass for sweeping 3,…

Programming languages take a long time to build. Zig is a more ambitious project than most. I see lots of progress in these release notes and I'm happy to "give a pass" for the fact that it's not finished. No one's been giving passes bewildering or otherwise for sweeping issues under the rug, because that didn't happen. The 0.16 release notes are linking to plenty of GitHub issues. If you have additional information…

I think Andrew should seriously think about decoupling the toolchain from the language to put focus on reaching stability there. As it is, we have the compiler with surrounding toolchain, the standard library and the language. The two former can keep evolving even language is fixed.

Just being ambitious isn’t necessarily good. Look at Perl6.

Re: Zig 0.16.0 Release Notes

#44

Post by lerno » Mon, Apr 20, 2026, 10:28 AM UTC

ksec wrote: post #41

baranul wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's strange, because it has been over 10 years now. To get to 0.20, seems like it would be another 2 to 3 years. The weirdest thing is how Zig continuously gets a pass for being "almost there", for around 5 years now. An argument could be made that why it's taking so long is about the language's BDFL wanting the freedom to continually make breaking changes. As it is, they got another bewildering pass for sweeping 3,…

I honestly dont see it as an issue. At least not for now. You could have languages or software released as 1.0 at any time but they are not finished or ready for it. Arguably Crystal is a bit like that. Or you end up like NIM which they are on 3rd or 4th version already. And frankly speaking, a lot of people took to Wiki and said it has been 10 years, in reality Andrew only started working on it full time in 2018, an…

Odin started in 2017, had a fraction of the contributors and is soon 1.0, so that explanation isn’t cutting it.

If you instead look at the over 500 kloc of the Zig source compared to the 70 kloc of the Odin one, it’s a bit clearer why the delay happened: the goals of Zig kept expanding.

But not only that: ”juicy main” and Io is something that could have been in Zig from the early days and yet it isn’t. In the Io case it’s Zig pivoting from ”we have colorless async!” to no async, to Io.

In other words, Andrew is still experimenting with the language (and more is to come, like ranged integers). This is not the signs of a maturing language, it a language still very much in flux, trying to find its form.

The contrast to Odin is that for the last 2-3 years it has had minimal syntax tweaks, and is essentially in release candidate mode for the language.

Even if Zig didn’t need more changes, it would still need that stabilization period.

This tells us Zig is still rather far from 1.0.

I wonder what Andrew is thinking about all this.