5 ms·

Hi Andy, I'm really intrigued by Zig's features - you're definitely solving the right and hard problems for C developers like myself. If I may, my only piece o

Hi Andy, I'm really intrigued by Zig's features - you're definitely solving the right and hard problems for C developers like myself. If I may, my only piece of feedback (as someone who looked at Zig with fresh eyes) is that the syntax has lots of special chars (@, !void, .{}, &, etc). Is there a rationale published for these and other design choices (even if it's "I like it that way"). I would have expected a language with ambitious goals like Zig to take a stab at coming up with a grammar that's even simpler and cleaner than C. Regardless, getting a new programming language working, noticed and used is monumental effort, so I wish you best of luck with Zig!

dnautics 5y ago
One of the things after working with zig for a bit, is that the dangerous stuff is cumbersome to write (not hard to read, though), and has lots of fiddly bits like @ signs... So your eye is drawn to it as if to say "here are the parts of the code that need careful review". Relative to c, though there are imo fewer special chars:. Zig adds ! and ?, Which are there for really good reason, but subtracts for example <> and #. The hardest thing is the . syntax for anonymous structs and tuples, but to be fair it is very consistent, and so many times I'd think,"hey I wonder if..." And then try it with the syntax and of course it works.
szanni 5y ago
>If I may, my only piece of feedback (as someone who looked at Zig with fresh eyes) is that the syntax has lots of special chars (@, !void, .{}, &, etc). Is there a rationale published for these and other design choices (even if it's "I like it that way"). I would have expected a language with ambitious goals like Zig to take a stab at coming up with a grammar that's even simpler and cleaner than C. That is sadly my gripe with a lot of the newer languages too. I have been looking for something to replace C for a long time, something that makes it easier to not shoot yourself in the foot. I just find most of them significantly less readable than C. Rust seems to be going down the route of C++, hence I do not deem it a safe language at all, as I have an exceedingly hard time parsing the source and figuring out what is going on. Zig is WAY better in that regard, but as OP mentions: all the special characters make things more difficult to parse. Calls like these (taken from the introduction page) contain so much visual clutter: try expect(@call(.{}, add, .{3, 9}) == 12); I sadly doubt any of this is possible to change at this stage anymore. Zig definitely seems the most promising C replacement with regards to tooling, especially cross compiling and C interop are a breeze. Truly inspiring work! The only new C-like language that really nailed it for me syntax wise would be Nim. Very clean and easy to reason about, which - from a programmer perspective - makes it exceedingly safe to program in. It just seemingly lacks most of the safety guarantees that the compilers of other, newer languages provide.
- cb321 5y ago
  You should take a closer look at Nim. I suspect it probably has all that you want, but said features may not be "by default/well advertised" (yet). Alternatively, you should be more specific about what you think it lacks.
- simplify 5y ago
  Isn't the example difficult to parse only because it's unfamiliar to you? As someone who has never used zig, I feel like 5 minutes of study would make this line easy to read.

dnautics 5y ago

One of the things after working with zig for a bit, is that the dangerous stuff is cumbersome to write (not hard to read, though), and has lots of fiddly bits like @ signs... So your eye is drawn to it as if to say "here are the parts of the code that need careful review". Relative to c, though there are imo fewer special chars:. Zig adds ! and ?, Which are there for really good reason, but subtracts for example <> and #. The hardest thing is the . syntax for anonymous structs and tuples, but to be fair it is very consistent, and so many times I'd think,"hey I wonder if..." And then try it with the syntax and of course it works.

szanni 5y ago

>If I may, my only piece of feedback (as someone who looked at Zig with fresh eyes) is that the syntax has lots of special chars (@, !void, .{}, &, etc). Is there a rationale published for these and other design choices (even if it's "I like it that way"). I would have expected a language with ambitious goals like Zig to take a stab at coming up with a grammar that's even simpler and cleaner than C. That is sadly my gripe with a lot of the newer languages too. I have been looking for something to replace C for a long time, something that makes it easier to not shoot yourself in the foot. I just find most of them significantly less readable than C. Rust seems to be going down the route of C++, hence I do not deem it a safe language at all, as I have an exceedingly hard time parsing the source and figuring out what is going on. Zig is WAY better in that regard, but as OP mentions: all the special characters make things more difficult to parse. Calls like these (taken from the introduction page) contain so much visual clutter: try expect(@call(.{}, add, .{3, 9}) == 12); I sadly doubt any of this is possible to change at this stage anymore. Zig definitely seems the most promising C replacement with regards to tooling, especially cross compiling and C interop are a breeze. Truly inspiring work! The only new C-like language that really nailed it for me syntax wise would be Nim. Very clean and easy to reason about, which - from a programmer perspective - makes it exceedingly safe to program in. It just seemingly lacks most of the safety guarantees that the compilers of other, newer languages provide.

cb321 5y ago
You should take a closer look at Nim. I suspect it probably has all that you want, but said features may not be "by default/well advertised" (yet). Alternatively, you should be more specific about what you think it lacks.
simplify 5y ago
Isn't the example difficult to parse only because it's unfamiliar to you? As someone who has never used zig, I feel like 5 minutes of study would make this line easy to read.