4 ms·

Zig, Hare, Odin, Vale, V, Jai

5 points by orangetuba 4y ago

There are a lot of new languages that try to be "a better C" or "less complicated C++". Are there people here who are familiar with some of these languages that would be willing to share their opinion about what they think these languages are trying to solve? I mean, how they are different from C or C++.

Comevius 4y ago
I'm only familiar with Zig, but it's trying to be a more orthogonal (more consistent, symmetric) system programming language, which makes it easier to read, write and reason about. Zig is aiming to be a C-compatible alternative with less cruft and footguns.
- voigt 4y ago
  Plus: Zig brings a great Build System for (cross-)compiling. It’s very adaptable, so you can even build C, rust, go or whatever language…
colesantiago 4y ago
All of these languages are currently in the toys stage except for probably Zig. If I would have to take a guess, Zig and possibly V would most likely be used and the others are just experiments.
- orangetuba 4y ago
  Good to know. I will keep that in mind and maybe have a look at Zig.
- xtian 4y ago
  I'm most interested in Zig personally, but your broad characterization is extremely inaccurate. Odin is being used for a very sophisticated shipping commercial product (EmberGen), and Jai, while not publicly available, is objectively way beyond the level of a "toy".
orangetuba 4y ago
Someone asked pretty much the same question on reddit, apparently: https://www.reddit.com/r/C_Programming/comments/nqkn93/what_do_people_think_of_the_c_replacements_are/ https://www.reddit.com/r/C_Programming/comments/nqkn93/what_...
bjourne 4y ago
My opinion is that these languages are an utter waste of time and will not see mainstream adoption (notwithstanding that members of these languages' communities derive a lot of pleasure from writing software in their respective language, hence why you see lots of "X rewritten in Y" posts on HN). 99.99% of all software should not be written in anything resembling either C or C++. The future of software development is not "a more user-friendly C" - it is a "more user-friendly Python" (or some other high-level language).
- orangetuba 4y ago
  Drivers, operating systems, databases, browsers and games written in garbage collected languages? How will they manage to be competitive? C is currently one of the most used languages in the world. I don't think that they are trying to replace Java or Python, but C, for the areas where C is used today.
  - duped 4y ago
    I see a lot of misplaced hate thrown at garbage collection without warrant. Some things don't make sense to use GC for (for example, allocators or garbage collectors themselves), but modern GC is as fast if not faster than manual memory management at scale. The performance issues often attributed to GC often come from more obvious issues, like dynamic dispatch, boxing/unboxing of values, and dynamic typing. It's just somewhat rare to see statically typed languages with modern concurrent GC. Go is one example, and Go is remarkably fast. Meanwhile Java has been running on more resource constrained systems for 30 years than Rust can target today, for example.
    - orangetuba 4y ago
      Do you predict a future where drivers, operating systems, databases, browsers and games etc. will be written in a language such as Go?
      - duped 4y ago
        There are already drivers, databases, and games written in GC'd environments. Operating systems are not monolithic enough to say anything, some portions can and probably should be gc'd and others require explicit control over memory operations that don't make sense to a GC. Browsers already have a significant amount of work that they do using garbage collection. So not so much future as present.
guidorice 4y ago
One view from the geospatial, data science, and machine learning world: Python is the most commonly used language, among my peers. However all the heavy lifting is done by C/C++ libraries which Python binds with. NumPy, GDAL, GEOS, Tensorflow, Torch, are all C/C++ libs. Zig's C-interoperability is actually pretty huge in this context. Not familiar with the other 5 languages the OP listed.

5 points by orangetuba 4y ago

Comevius 4y ago

I'm only familiar with Zig, but it's trying to be a more orthogonal (more consistent, symmetric) system programming language, which makes it easier to read, write and reason about. Zig is aiming to be a C-compatible alternative with less cruft and footguns.

voigt 4y ago
Plus: Zig brings a great Build System for (cross-)compiling. It’s very adaptable, so you can even build C, rust, go or whatever language…

colesantiago 4y ago

All of these languages are currently in the toys stage except for probably Zig. If I would have to take a guess, Zig and possibly V would most likely be used and the others are just experiments.

orangetuba 4y ago
Good to know. I will keep that in mind and maybe have a look at Zig.
xtian 4y ago
I'm most interested in Zig personally, but your broad characterization is extremely inaccurate. Odin is being used for a very sophisticated shipping commercial product (EmberGen), and Jai, while not publicly available, is objectively way beyond the level of a "toy".

orangetuba 4y ago

Someone asked pretty much the same question on reddit, apparently: https://www.reddit.com/r/C_Programming/comments/nqkn93/what_do_people_think_of_the_c_replacements_are/ https://www.reddit.com/r/C_Programming/comments/nqkn93/what_...

bjourne 4y ago

My opinion is that these languages are an utter waste of time and will not see mainstream adoption (notwithstanding that members of these languages' communities derive a lot of pleasure from writing software in their respective language, hence why you see lots of "X rewritten in Y" posts on HN). 99.99% of all software should not be written in anything resembling either C or C++. The future of software development is not "a more user-friendly C" - it is a "more user-friendly Python" (or some other high-level language).

orangetuba 4y ago
Drivers, operating systems, databases, browsers and games written in garbage collected languages? How will they manage to be competitive? C is currently one of the most used languages in the world. I don't think that they are trying to replace Java or Python, but C, for the areas where C is used today.
- duped 4y ago
  I see a lot of misplaced hate thrown at garbage collection without warrant. Some things don't make sense to use GC for (for example, allocators or garbage collectors themselves), but modern GC is as fast if not faster than manual memory management at scale. The performance issues often attributed to GC often come from more obvious issues, like dynamic dispatch, boxing/unboxing of values, and dynamic typing. It's just somewhat rare to see statically typed languages with modern concurrent GC. Go is one example, and Go is remarkably fast. Meanwhile Java has been running on more resource constrained systems for 30 years than Rust can target today, for example.
  - orangetuba 4y ago
    Do you predict a future where drivers, operating systems, databases, browsers and games etc. will be written in a language such as Go?
    - duped 4y ago
      There are already drivers, databases, and games written in GC'd environments. Operating systems are not monolithic enough to say anything, some portions can and probably should be gc'd and others require explicit control over memory operations that don't make sense to a GC. Browsers already have a significant amount of work that they do using garbage collection. So not so much future as present.

guidorice 4y ago

One view from the geospatial, data science, and machine learning world: Python is the most commonly used language, among my peers. However all the heavy lifting is done by C/C++ libraries which Python binds with. NumPy, GDAL, GEOS, Tensorflow, Torch, are all C/C++ libs. Zig's C-interoperability is actually pretty huge in this context. Not familiar with the other 5 languages the OP listed.