3 ms·
> A lot of these complaints are just, well, it’s called Progress. If we designed the C in 2018 and made it so we actually wanted to use it, then it would look v
by mschwaig 8y ago
> A lot of these complaints are just, well, it’s called Progress. If we designed the C in 2018 and made it so we actually wanted to use it, then it would look very different. Probably a lot like Nim or Swift. I think that’s still a niche that is currently unfilled; a modern, powerful language that doesn’t try to provide the same guarantees as Rust and so can be much more minimalist.
I think zig is quite a good candidate to fill that niche.
It is very compatible with C, but it offers meaningful improvements while still being very picky about what goes into the language.
- grok2 8y agoZig is good, but I like the look of Kit (https://www.kitlang.org/ https://www.kitlang.org/)...it feels a lot more C like with many of the features (ADT/pattern-matching/generics/type-inference) of the latest crop of languages. Not fully ready though, but promising.
- jungler 8y agoThe two projects have different ambitions, really. Kit is a "compiles to C" that adds on some nifty semantics. There are many similar efforts in that vein, and they benefit by reusing the leverage of the existing infrastructure and patching it up, but that isn't going to change the underlying environment - you'll still build and debug as if it were C. Zig is trying to replace the very bottom of the stack. Although it's bootstrapping off a C++/LLVM environment itself, the effort is more ground-up and will remove much of the undefined or vendor-specific behavior that currently exists in C tooling, while still adding some high-level niceties, just probably not as many as an applications-focused language.