from Hacker News

Zig: What to Expect from Release Month

by enz on 1/17/25, 1:35 PM with 58 comments

  • by picafrost on 1/17/25, 2:46 PM

    Writing Zig has been bringing me a lot of joy. It feels like I’m working with a machine again. The memory safety guardrails are just high enough to help out without feeling like a tourist trap.

    There is space to enjoy writing code with someone’s PhD dissertation, untyped dynamic free for alls, and all that in between. Zig feels like a hacker's language.

  • by anacrolix on 1/31/25, 2:37 AM

    So professional. Also Infected Mushroom is great.
  • by travisgriggs on 1/17/25, 2:24 PM

    I’ve been a lurking fan of Zig for a while. Discovering they listen to IM and Bliss to code to just made me like their project even more.
  • by ta8645 on 1/17/25, 9:29 PM

    Zig is a joy to write; it feels like a much-improved C. Writing and cross-compiling a custom app for Windows was great. The only thing I'd mention is that there is a lot of outdated information on the net for it. Zig has evolved and changed quite a bit, leaving it quite difficult to search (or chatbot) for up-to-date information on its syntax and idioms. It can be frustrating to get so many incorrect answers.
  • by tomrod on 1/17/25, 2:43 PM

    Cool to see!

    I'm interested in learning a lower level language a bit better. I've spent some time in Rust and C (not enough to be proficient) -- is Zig a good candidate? It seems to have a lot of interest, I'm curious about objective views on its long term progress and forecast.

  • by the__alchemist on 1/17/25, 2:57 PM

    Ok, fuck it. Today project: Porting my vector and quaternion from Rust to Zig as a learning project.
  • by mgrandl on 1/17/25, 2:26 PM

    There are so many cool projects using Zig already. Very excited for its future!
  • by jvillasante on 1/17/25, 2:50 PM

    I've been trying to understand what Zig place is in the world so I can learn more about it. I like the idea of simplicity in programming languages but, other than that and since there's Go already, what is the proposition here?

    In particular:

    - LLVM is not enough, let's write our own compiler.

    - Interfaces are an overhead, use comptime instead or roll your own vtables.

    - In a world where "memory unsafe" languages are under attack... yeah, we don't care about that.

    I'm not trolling, this are serious questions from afar that I would love to figure out before investing time with Zig.

  • by etyp on 1/17/25, 2:34 PM

    I'm excited to see how that x86 backend is, I haven't tried it yet. It's definitely an interesting step for a new language to do on its own
  • by icsa on 1/18/25, 7:02 AM

    Regarding Aro (new C compiler in the Zig toochain), it seems that a C compiler written in Zig shortens considerably the path to supporting constexpr in C using Zig's comptime capabilities.
  • by gtirloni on 1/17/25, 2:50 PM

    The C/C++ dropin compiler replacement in Zig now seems like a missed opportunity in Rust. Would that even be possible?
  • by hansvm on 1/17/25, 2:38 PM

    Incremental compilation!