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In what industries is Zig popular? I'm asking as I saw Zig as being the 'highest' paid language on the 2023 Stack Overflow Dev survey - https://survey.stackover

In what industries is Zig popular? I'm asking as I saw Zig as being the 'highest' paid language on the 2023 Stack Overflow Dev survey - https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2023/#section-salary-salary-and-experience-by-language https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2023/#section-salary-salary-... The performance looks outstanding!

csjh 3y ago
It's still pretty early on, but it's aim is to be a C successor I believe. Main example of usage off the top of my head is for bun.sh
- itake 3y ago
  how is that different from rust? or is rust a cpp successor?
  - r87 3y ago
    Rust is more of a c++ successor, yes. It’s very much a kitchen sink language.
  - seattle444 3y ago
    Rust lives in the smart pointer world. So a good candidate as a c++ succesor. Zig lives in arena alloc and soa world. So it's a better than rust when you need performance beyond the norm.
    - steveklabnik 3y ago
      Just to be clear, you can absolutely do arena allocation and soa in Rust.
      - bvrmn 3y ago
        In Rust you have convenient escape hatch with a default allocator. It's similar to say "you can do safe applications using C or C++".
srgpqt 3y ago
Zig is still rather new, but it would be a good alternative to C, C++, Rust and Go.
- dontlaugh 3y ago
  The first three, but not Go.
  - IggleSniggle 3y ago
    Why not Go? Not very comparable due to GC and goroutines?
    - dontlaugh 3y ago
      Right. The others are system languages you could write a kernel or a game engine in.
      - TwentyPosts 3y ago
        I'm going to be pedantic here, but this merely means that Go can't fill Zig's niche. Zig can (in a lot of situations) presumably easily fill Go's role. Both languages have a focus on simplicity and explicit syntax. In other words, Zig is in fact a decent alternative to Go. Go just isn't a good alternative to Zig.
        littlestymaar 3y ago
        Zig isn't memory-safe, and you're not going to pay for the development overhead of manual memory management if you're doing regular back-end stuff.
        memefrog 3y ago
        People did for decades and a lot of that "regular back-end stuff" is in C++ at the moment. If you wanted to move it to a different language, you might currently choose to move it bit-by-bit to Go. But you could also move it bit-by-bit to Zig, and it wouldn't be an unreasonable choice. Zig is in that sense an alternative to Go, IMO.
zengid 3y ago
I was wondering this exact thing! Who's out there getting paid to write Zig?
- e4m2 3y ago
  The core Zig devs, TigerBeetle and Bun are the main ones AFAIK. The latter two are VC backed, the Zig Software Foundation is a 501(c)(3).
jedisct1 3y ago
Zig is very popular for WebAssembly: https://wasm4.org/blog/jam-2-results/ https://wasm4.org/blog/jam-2-results/
Aransentin 3y ago
My company uses Zig to write software for small Linux devices, such as set-top boxes. The biggest benefit isn't exactly performance, but the absurdly tiny binaries it produces (very convenient if you are working with small flash disks!), and how the Zig standard library doesn't depend on anything other than the kernel, which means you can often entirely ignore all library issues; more often than not our software 'just works' when built for some new customer platform even though I've never even targeted that environment (or even CPU architecture) before.
- bryancoxwell 3y ago
  If you don’t mind me asking, how long has your company been using Zig in production?
  - Aransentin 3y ago
    We first finished a Zig application three years ago, but that was a fairly small demo project which we didn't have to support afterwards.
littlestymaar 3y ago
> the performance looks outstanding! Well, given that in their benchmark Go ends up Boeing almost an order of magnitude raster than Rust, I wouldn't trust their benchmarking methodology too much.
fransje26 3y ago
Wasn't Uber using Zig? At least for it's cross-compiler features, if I recall properly.
- jedisct1 3y ago
  Yes, Uber use Zig: https://www.uber.com/en-FR/blog/bootstrapping-ubers-infrastructure-on-arm64-with-zig/ https://www.uber.com/en-FR/blog/bootstrapping-ubers-infrastr...

csjh 3y ago

It's still pretty early on, but it's aim is to be a C successor I believe. Main example of usage off the top of my head is for bun.sh

itake 3y ago
how is that different from rust? or is rust a cpp successor?
- r87 3y ago
  Rust is more of a c++ successor, yes. It’s very much a kitchen sink language.
- seattle444 3y ago
  Rust lives in the smart pointer world. So a good candidate as a c++ succesor. Zig lives in arena alloc and soa world. So it's a better than rust when you need performance beyond the norm.
  - steveklabnik 3y ago
    Just to be clear, you can absolutely do arena allocation and soa in Rust.
    - bvrmn 3y ago
      In Rust you have convenient escape hatch with a default allocator. It's similar to say "you can do safe applications using C or C++".

srgpqt 3y ago

Zig is still rather new, but it would be a good alternative to C, C++, Rust and Go.

dontlaugh 3y ago
The first three, but not Go.
- IggleSniggle 3y ago
  Why not Go? Not very comparable due to GC and goroutines?
  - dontlaugh 3y ago
    Right. The others are system languages you could write a kernel or a game engine in.
    - TwentyPosts 3y ago
      I'm going to be pedantic here, but this merely means that Go can't fill Zig's niche. Zig can (in a lot of situations) presumably easily fill Go's role. Both languages have a focus on simplicity and explicit syntax. In other words, Zig is in fact a decent alternative to Go. Go just isn't a good alternative to Zig.
      - littlestymaar 3y ago
        Zig isn't memory-safe, and you're not going to pay for the development overhead of manual memory management if you're doing regular back-end stuff.
        memefrog 3y ago
        People did for decades and a lot of that "regular back-end stuff" is in C++ at the moment. If you wanted to move it to a different language, you might currently choose to move it bit-by-bit to Go. But you could also move it bit-by-bit to Zig, and it wouldn't be an unreasonable choice. Zig is in that sense an alternative to Go, IMO.

zengid 3y ago

I was wondering this exact thing! Who's out there getting paid to write Zig?

e4m2 3y ago
The core Zig devs, TigerBeetle and Bun are the main ones AFAIK. The latter two are VC backed, the Zig Software Foundation is a 501(c)(3).

jedisct1 3y ago

Zig is very popular for WebAssembly: https://wasm4.org/blog/jam-2-results/ https://wasm4.org/blog/jam-2-results/

Aransentin 3y ago

My company uses Zig to write software for small Linux devices, such as set-top boxes. The biggest benefit isn't exactly performance, but the absurdly tiny binaries it produces (very convenient if you are working with small flash disks!), and how the Zig standard library doesn't depend on anything other than the kernel, which means you can often entirely ignore all library issues; more often than not our software 'just works' when built for some new customer platform even though I've never even targeted that environment (or even CPU architecture) before.

bryancoxwell 3y ago
If you don’t mind me asking, how long has your company been using Zig in production?
- Aransentin 3y ago
  We first finished a Zig application three years ago, but that was a fairly small demo project which we didn't have to support afterwards.

littlestymaar 3y ago

> the performance looks outstanding! Well, given that in their benchmark Go ends up Boeing almost an order of magnitude raster than Rust, I wouldn't trust their benchmarking methodology too much.

fransje26 3y ago

Wasn't Uber using Zig? At least for it's cross-compiler features, if I recall properly.

jedisct1 3y ago
Yes, Uber use Zig: https://www.uber.com/en-FR/blog/bootstrapping-ubers-infrastructure-on-arm64-with-zig/ https://www.uber.com/en-FR/blog/bootstrapping-ubers-infrastr...