Programming

17538 readers

71 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Follow the programming.dev instance rules
Keep content related to programming in some way
If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

snowe

Ategon

[email protected]

103

Let's talk about Zig (self.programming)

submitted 1 year ago by Blackthorn to c/programming

47 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I have been reading about this new language for a while. It's a C competitor, very slim language with very interesting choices, like supporting cross platform compilation out of the box, supports compiling C/C++ code (and can be used as a drop in replacement for C) to the point in can be used as replacement of (c)make and executables are very small.

But, like all languages, adoption is what makes the difference. And we don't know how it goes.

Is anyone actually using Zig right now? Any thoughts?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Vorpal 19 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I really don't see what niche it is trying to fill that isn't already occupied.

Rust is as successful as it is because it found a previously unoccupied niche: safe systems programming without garbage collector and with high level abstractions that (mostly) optimise away.

I don't think "better C" is a big enough niche to be of interest to enough people for it to gain a critical mass. I certainly have very little interest in it myself.

[–] philm 1 points 1 year ago

Yeah my thinking as well.

Addtionally, why I think other system language competitors like Zig or Nim aren't succeeding long-term, is because of fast growth and already big ecosystem of Rust. Zig may be better though for some use-cases (when you want to avoid all the mental overhead, and the application stays simple).

load more comments (2 replies)