Zig: What to Expect from Release Month

by enzon 1/17/2025, 1:35 PMwith 58 comments

by picafroston 1/17/2025, 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 anacrolixon 1/31/2025, 2:37 AM

So professional. Also Infected Mushroom is great.

by travisgriggson 1/17/2025, 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 ta8645on 1/17/2025, 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 The only thing I'd mention is that there is a lot of outdated information on the net for it.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 tomrodon 1/17/2025, 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__alchemiston 1/17/2025, 2:57 PM

Ok, fuck it. Today project: Porting my vector and quaternion from Rust to Zig as a learning project.

by mgrandlon 1/17/2025, 2:26 PM

There are so many cool projects using Zig already. Very excited for its future!

by jvillasanteon 1/17/2025, 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 etypon 1/17/2025, 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 icsaon 1/18/2025, 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 gtirlonion 1/17/2025, 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 hansvmon 1/17/2025, 2:38 PM

Incremental compilation!