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> Zig is too uninteresting to eclipse anything. As someone who knows C and not Zig, Zig is very interesting. It has incremental compilation, in-place binary pa

by fouric 6y ago

> Zig is too uninteresting to eclipse anything. As someone who knows C and not Zig, Zig is very interesting. It has incremental compilation, in-place binary patching, the ability to use code before declaration in a file, compile-time code execution, and extremely low compile times. Rust itself doesn't have most of those. Also, as Python illustrated, a language doesn't have to be interesting to be popular. As Python also illustrated, a language can be opinionated and popular. I'm growing more and more convinced that useful languages have to be opinionated - opinions have to be somewhere, and if they're not in the language (where the entire community is forced to use them), then they'll have to be in individual code-bases, where you'll get a bunch of fragmentation (which I think was one of the things that killed Lisp). Now, Zig is very imperfect - no hidden control flow/operator overloading, no REPL, and a weak type system, most notably - but it's better than C in almost every way, easier to learn than Rust, and way more conceptually scalable than FORTH (which has a more "beautiful" design).

ttt0 6y ago
> no REPL Personally I don't find it necessary, but the proposal for REPL has been accepted: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/596 https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/596
pjmlp 6y ago
Incremental compilation, edit-and-continue are available in Visual C and C++. REPLs do exist for C and C++. Zig security story is hardly much better than using something like Free Pascal, with even less libraries.
- fouric 6y ago
  > Incremental compilation, edit-and-continue are available in Visual C and C++. In a particular toolchain not available cross-platform - not comparable to Zig having it available in the reference implementation, which is open-source and cross-platform. > REPLs do exist for C and C++. Hacky, nonstandard ones with limitations and altered semantics that aren't included in any of the major IDE's. Not remotely comparable to what's provided with SLIME.
vlang1dot0 6y ago
> It has incremental compilation, in-place binary patching, the ability to use code before declaration in a file, compile-time code execution, and extremely low compile times. Rust itself doesn't have most of those. Rust has all of those except in place binary patching and fast compile times.
- fouric 6y ago
  Rust's "compile-time code execution" is a horrendously complex joke, and it's compile times are so atrociously long that the lack of those two things you mentioned is even worse than in a language like C (with somewhat-sane compilation speed).
kllrnohj 6y ago
> Also, as Python illustrated, a language doesn't have to be interesting to be popular. Python was very interesting, or rather, Python is the thing in its interesting group that survived. Highly flexible scripting language with a "batteries included" library set is a very compelling sales pitch, even today. It was Perl but readable, and in this case simply being "readable" was interesting enough to cause it to win out (and also Perl's internal drama) > As Python also illustrated, a language can be opinionated and popular. Python's "style guide" is opinionated, but Python the language itself isn't that opinionated. Missing ++ & -- are about the only contentious "opinionated" aspects to it. You can fiddle with basically everything else however you want, though, and the language made adjustments to make that even more possible (eg, replacing the print keyword with the overridable print() function). Critically Python's standard library didn't really get any special treatment from the language. When a language lets the standard library or builtins do things that you can't, that's when it gets really questionable.
- fulafel 6y ago
  "Perl but readable" and "batteries included" are true but leave out some equally important things: The explicit reference / dereference business in Perl makes handling nested data structures pretty annoying and strongly guides programmers to avoid those, which has a lot of compounding effects to structure of prgorams. Also Python embraced multiplatform early on, and had eg excellent Windows support, whereas Perl was always Unix first. Also the culture is important. Python was always beginner-friendly whereas Perl people were less likely to suffer fools gladly.
int_19h 6y ago
A good example of what happens when the language is not sufficiently opinionated is the modern-day JavaScript/Node.js ecosystem.

by fouric 6y ago

ttt0 6y ago

> no REPL Personally I don't find it necessary, but the proposal for REPL has been accepted: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/596 https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/596

pjmlp 6y ago

Incremental compilation, edit-and-continue are available in Visual C and C++. REPLs do exist for C and C++. Zig security story is hardly much better than using something like Free Pascal, with even less libraries.

fouric 6y ago
> Incremental compilation, edit-and-continue are available in Visual C and C++. In a particular toolchain not available cross-platform - not comparable to Zig having it available in the reference implementation, which is open-source and cross-platform. > REPLs do exist for C and C++. Hacky, nonstandard ones with limitations and altered semantics that aren't included in any of the major IDE's. Not remotely comparable to what's provided with SLIME.

vlang1dot0 6y ago

> It has incremental compilation, in-place binary patching, the ability to use code before declaration in a file, compile-time code execution, and extremely low compile times. Rust itself doesn't have most of those. Rust has all of those except in place binary patching and fast compile times.

fouric 6y ago
Rust's "compile-time code execution" is a horrendously complex joke, and it's compile times are so atrociously long that the lack of those two things you mentioned is even worse than in a language like C (with somewhat-sane compilation speed).

kllrnohj 6y ago

> Also, as Python illustrated, a language doesn't have to be interesting to be popular. Python was very interesting, or rather, Python is the thing in its interesting group that survived. Highly flexible scripting language with a "batteries included" library set is a very compelling sales pitch, even today. It was Perl but readable, and in this case simply being "readable" was interesting enough to cause it to win out (and also Perl's internal drama) > As Python also illustrated, a language can be opinionated and popular. Python's "style guide" is opinionated, but Python the language itself isn't that opinionated. Missing ++ & -- are about the only contentious "opinionated" aspects to it. You can fiddle with basically everything else however you want, though, and the language made adjustments to make that even more possible (eg, replacing the print keyword with the overridable print() function). Critically Python's standard library didn't really get any special treatment from the language. When a language lets the standard library or builtins do things that you can't, that's when it gets really questionable.

fulafel 6y ago
"Perl but readable" and "batteries included" are true but leave out some equally important things: The explicit reference / dereference business in Perl makes handling nested data structures pretty annoying and strongly guides programmers to avoid those, which has a lot of compounding effects to structure of prgorams. Also Python embraced multiplatform early on, and had eg excellent Windows support, whereas Perl was always Unix first. Also the culture is important. Python was always beginner-friendly whereas Perl people were less likely to suffer fools gladly.

int_19h 6y ago

A good example of what happens when the language is not sufficiently opinionated is the modern-day JavaScript/Node.js ecosystem.