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For anyone like me who's hearing of Zig for the first time, I totally encourage y'all to watch the video that's attached on his Patreon page. It's rare to see

by nstart 8y ago

For anyone like me who's hearing of Zig for the first time, I totally encourage y'all to watch the video that's attached on his Patreon page. It's rare to see a technical presentation done in a way where the concepts are so clearly understandable. Makes me want to take a peek into Zig and see what it's like in there and consider supporting the author just because. Hope it works out well enough for him to live his dream :).

gota 8y ago
I'm tempted to spend a good while studying Zig just because it says "Zig competes with C instead of depending on it" and folks here are not thrashing it ('Why compete with C at all?' would be my guess of general reaction)
- jschwartzi 8y ago
  Based on what other posters are saying about the language design and the interface design, it's built in such a way that you don't have to do a ton of boilerplate to integrate Zig code with C/C++ projects. That, in turn, means that you can start new sections of your code base in Zig and gradually start eating your legacy C/C++ code until you have a project written in Zig instead of C. And it seems like it does this by not being too opinionated about your use of memory, unlike Rust. I would be really interested in using it if I had more Clang support in bare metal systems. I think the consensus among embedded developers is that we would all really, really like a modern language with modern type-safety and type-checking, but we also still want to do crazy crap with memory at times. It doesn't matter so much that there's a way to do something, but it matters a great deal how you are expected to do it. Keeping it simple matters, and Zig looks pretty simple compared to other compiled systems languages that I've seen, so that's wonderful.
  - AndyKelley 8y ago
    > you can start new sections of your code base in Zig and gradually start eating your legacy C/C++ code until you have a project written in Zig instead of C. http://tiehuis.github.io/iterative-replacement-of-c-with-zig http://tiehuis.github.io/iterative-replacement-of-c-with-zig
  - tom_mellior 8y ago
    > not being too opinionated about your use of memory That's a bit hard to tell, isn't it? When I checked out the docs after last week's Zig thread, the entire section on memory allocation was a big fat TODO.

by nstart 8y ago

gota 8y ago

I'm tempted to spend a good while studying Zig just because it says "Zig competes with C instead of depending on it" and folks here are not thrashing it ('Why compete with C at all?' would be my guess of general reaction)

jschwartzi 8y ago
Based on what other posters are saying about the language design and the interface design, it's built in such a way that you don't have to do a ton of boilerplate to integrate Zig code with C/C++ projects. That, in turn, means that you can start new sections of your code base in Zig and gradually start eating your legacy C/C++ code until you have a project written in Zig instead of C. And it seems like it does this by not being too opinionated about your use of memory, unlike Rust. I would be really interested in using it if I had more Clang support in bare metal systems. I think the consensus among embedded developers is that we would all really, really like a modern language with modern type-safety and type-checking, but we also still want to do crazy crap with memory at times. It doesn't matter so much that there's a way to do something, but it matters a great deal how you are expected to do it. Keeping it simple matters, and Zig looks pretty simple compared to other compiled systems languages that I've seen, so that's wonderful.
- AndyKelley 8y ago
  > you can start new sections of your code base in Zig and gradually start eating your legacy C/C++ code until you have a project written in Zig instead of C. http://tiehuis.github.io/iterative-replacement-of-c-with-zig http://tiehuis.github.io/iterative-replacement-of-c-with-zig
- tom_mellior 8y ago
  > not being too opinionated about your use of memory That's a bit hard to tell, isn't it? When I checked out the docs after last week's Zig thread, the entire section on memory allocation was a big fat TODO.