the TRUTH about this NEW Language (BETTER Than Rust and C++?)

When I first heard about the Zig Programming Language, I was skeptical. Did we really need to invent a new language in the System Programming space? But, after thinking about it for a while and messing around with the language, I think there is a very special spot in the systems programming world for this new language.

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[vanweapon]

As a JS dev by trade hearing people calling C bloated will never not be hilarious to me

[chbrules]

"C has a lot of bloat" is something I didn't think I'd ever hear in a serious conversation with anyone that wasn't interested in just asm programming.

[luisz]

I was on there discord for a while, they are a good community and try their best to help anyone that ask. I’m personally waiting for 1.0 but is good that you give it a try!

[avi]

I like that you are covering zig,
but you didn't mention some of best selling points:
comptime, the build system, the interoperability with existing c code, and error handling.

[mechwarrior]

Exciting times we stand in where there are some genuine alternatives to C. They don't have the same pedigree and standing at crossroads is never fun but I am genuinely excited to see where this goes.

[kabochaVA]

3:11 "All your (code)base are belong to us"
I love that reference to the game Zero Wing, in which the space fighter craft you control is called... ZIG.

[mastermati]

In my head, I keep them in matrix: Zig being an alternative for C and Rust for C++.

[thedrunknmunky]

I love the simplicity of C, and the fact that Rust is so complex is a deal-breaker to me. Zig on the other hand might be something worth learning, as its simple and avoids making binaries that are massive in size. Its almost perfect for embedded.

[enderger]

Yeah, Zig’s great usually. It just shows it’s pre 1.0 status a good bit (I’ve reported a few internal compiler errors and dealt with some annoying problems while writing my Scheme implementation).

[MRL]

I feel like out of all these new system languages, Zig is the closest in spirit to the good old C, but with some reasonable modernizations. It doesn't try to revolutionize too much about the way people program, like Rust does, instead it sticks to the good old structural, imperative programming with manual memory management, while bringing a lot of convinient features.

I think this might be the future language for a lot of embedded development and quite possibly the best alternative to C for kernel development.

[uturumint]

I tried it and really liked how it felt like c but better. Also I was blown away by the comptime feature and how it's used. And meta programmjng is nice too

[Trequetrum]

"One level above assembly, one level below c" is perhaps the strangest way I've seen Zig described to date. Apparently not loading a std library puts it below C (is C a level below itself when you don't load std library?), but what puts it above assembly? It's abstracted over the hardware, but no more or less than C is? What does it all mean!? :P But Zig is pretty dope, so onward!

[EmbeddedSorcery]

One of the reasons C++ has taken such a chunk of the embedded space is that it can provide *more* safety than C, and code maintainability and readability is usually much better. OOP can be dangerous, but in my work we use it sparingly. We also enjoy compile time templated code that's not possible with C... at least without a huge mess of macros. I'd be curious to see why Zig might be a better alternative to "C+", C++ without heap or too much bloat.

[kayakMike]

I recommend that people start with C BECAUSE you need to be aware of how memory works. Avoiding it because beginner developers might write unsafe code just delays the inevitablity of using a linter to identify where there's a security issue.

[esra_erimez]

I forgot about this language. It's really interesting. As someone who has an immense dislike for C++ and loves C, Rust and Go, I find Zig really interesting.

[ambuj.k]

As a javascript soy dev and someone who is learning rust, I'd really like to see where V language takes us with it's automatic memory management without garbage collection.

[alienmsehunter]

I used zig after using Rust for years and the thing that made me stop learning zig was the error messages. I found them really unhelpful. I understand that making good error messages is really hard but I think that it is the most important part of any new language. I also think it is very important when considering what language to learn first.

[icemojo]

I'd love to know your thoughts on Odin too. Both Zig and Odin set off with the same goal, a better C alternative systems language, without trying to be a memory safe language like Rust. But they both have entirely different philosophies.

I explored both of them a little bit a while ago, now sorta settled in with Odin. This may just be my personal taste, but I'm enjoying Odin a lot more than Zig, especially for game programming.

[philiphanhurst]

While it would probably be my perfect language in another world, many of the things it tries to do are just done better by other languages. Nim in particular comes to mind, since I feel it does things like c interop and compile-time evaluation much better, though it has much more hidden control flow and is very heavy on macros.

Really hope Zig matures though, it absolutely has a place in this world.

[maninalift]

I'm skeptical about languages that try to avoid strong abstractions, macros and reflection. In the end programmers will always want to do metaprogramming. If you don't think about how that will fit into your language from the start, then it probably won't fit well and you will end up with something like tools that half-arse-parse your language and generate code or abusing other features (like c++ template programming).