401–410 of 527 posts
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For anyone not familiar: You can bundle arbitrary software as Python wheels. Can be convenient in cases like this!
What "cases" are those? Tell me one useful and neat case. Why is it useful and neat, you think?
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We could not have written TigerBeetle, at least not the way it is, without Zig: https://tigerbeetle.com/blog/2025-10-25-synadia-and-tigerbee...
TigerBeetle has a clear purpose and needed those brilliant optimizations. Do you think Zig is suitable as, say, a Go replacement for prod network services and such? Aside from the fact that Zig is still a bit immature in its std library and ecosystem, I mean. Is it a suitable systems language going forward?
Zig is actually perfect for production network services (that’s all TB is essentially, or how I see it, and what I was looking for in Zig—how to create something with explicit limits that can handle overload—it’s hard to build anything production-grade if it’s not doing NASA’s Power of Ten and getting allocation right—GC is not a good idea for a network service).
I wouldn’t say Zig’s std lib is immature. Or if anything, it has higher quality than most std libs. For example, the unmanaged hashmap interface is :chefskiss. In comparison, many std libs are yet to get non-global allocators or static allocation or I/O right.
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…
Is there a decent native GUI library for Zig yet? I don't want to use bloated toolkits like GTK and Qt. I like the simplicity and speed of Rust's eGUI. Something similar for Zig would be amazing.
There is capy https://capy-ui.org/
I love systems programming language and have worked on the Ada language for a long time. I find Zig to be incredibly underwhelming. Absolutely nothing about it is new or novel, the closest being comptime which is not actually new. Also highly subjective but the syntax hurts my eyes. So I’m kind of interested by an answer to the question this articles fails to answer. Why do you guys find Zig so cool ?
I view Zig as a better C, though that might be subjective.
> Probably the most incredible virtue of Zig compiler is its ability to compile C code. This associated with the ability to cross-compile code to be run in another architecture, different than the machine where it is was originally compiled, is already something quite different and unique. Isn't cross compilation very, very ordinary? Inline C is cool, like C has inline ASM (for the target arch). But cross-compiling?…
> Isn't cross compilation very, very ordinary? Working cross compilation out of the box any-to-any still isn't.
I guess it's convenient to have support for many target architectures built in by default. I wonder how big that package is.
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Another way to look at this example is that, for the parser, this is not an error. The parser is doing its job correctly, providing an accurate interpretation of its input, and for the parser, this is qualitatively different from something that prevents it doing its job (say, running out of memory).
At the next level up, though, there might be code that expects to be able to read a JSON config file at a certain location, and if it fails, it’s reasonable to report which file it tried to read, the line number, and what the error was.
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I think even in the year of our lord 2016 there's room for a language with safe defaults but seamless interoperability with existing unsafe code. It's certainly an improvement on the status quo and provides an alternative to rewriting the world in Rust or a GC language.
Except Zig defaults could be found on the year of our Lord in 1976, 1978, 1983 and 1986. Exercise from other posts of mine which languages those might be.
So no, it's not as safe as rust in terms of memory, but it's quite close, and in the process lets you do some really cool stuff.
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The feature I want is multimethods -- function overloading based on the runtime (not compile time) type of all the arguments. Programming with it is magical, and its a huge drag to go back to languages without it. Just so much better than common OOP that depends only on the type of one special argument (self, this etc). Common Lisp has had it forever, and Dylan transferred that to a language with more conventional sy…
I think this is a major mistake for Zig's target adoption market - low level programmers trying to use a better C. Julia is phenomenally great for solo/small projects, but as soon as you have complex dependencies that _you_ can't update - all the overloading makes it an absolute nightmare to debug.
The tooling makes it easy to tell which version of a method you're using, though that's rarely an issue in practice. And the fact that methods are open to extension makes it really easy to fix occasional upstream bugs where the equivalent has to wait for a library maintainer in Python.
500kloc Julia over 4 years, so not a huge codebase, but not trivial either.