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Zig, Hare, Odin, Vale, V, Jai

by orangetuba on 5/31/22, 7:56 AM with 18 comments

There are a lot of new languages that try to be "a better C" or "less complicated C++". Are there people here who are familiar with some of these languages that would be willing to share their opinion about what they think these languages are trying to solve? I mean, how they are different from C or C++.

  • by bjourne on 5/31/22, 11:36 AM

    My opinion is that these languages are an utter waste of time and will not see mainstream adoption (notwithstanding that members of these languages' communities derive a lot of pleasure from writing software in their respective language, hence why you see lots of "X rewritten in Y" posts on HN). 99.99% of all software should not be written in anything resembling either C or C++. The future of software development is not "a more user-friendly C" - it is a "more user-friendly Python" (or some other high-level language).

  • by guidorice on 6/2/22, 7:27 PM

    One view from the geospatial, data science, and machine learning world: Python is the most commonly used language, among my peers. However all the heavy lifting is done by C/C++ libraries which Python binds with. NumPy, GDAL, GEOS, Tensorflow, Torch, are all C/C++ libs.

    Zig's C-interoperability is actually pretty huge in this context. Not familiar with the other 5 languages the OP listed.

  • by orangetuba on 5/31/22, 11:13 AM

    Someone asked pretty much the same question on reddit, apparently:

    https://www.reddit.com/r/C_Programming/comments/nqkn93/what_...

  • by Comevius on 5/31/22, 8:43 AM

    I'm only familiar with Zig, but it's trying to be a more orthogonal (more consistent, symmetric) system programming language, which makes it easier to read, write and reason about.

    Zig is aiming to be a C-compatible alternative with less cruft and footguns.

  • by colesantiago on 5/31/22, 10:04 AM

    All of these languages are currently in the toys stage except for probably Zig.

    If I would have to take a guess, Zig and possibly V would most likely be used and the others are just experiments.