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I am a big rust fan, but I'll say I don't think a language should need to justify its existence and whether it's redundant or not. Zig exists because its develo

I am a big rust fan, but I'll say I don't think a language should need to justify its existence and whether it's redundant or not. Zig exists because its developers and users want it to. People like coding in it, that's all the justification it needs. I'm glad people make new programming languages without asking permission from the world whether it provides enough value to exist. (TBC, I realize this page is more about answering questions about differences between zig and other languages, emphasizing its strengths, I just think the framing of the question is unfortunate)

EchoChamberMan 3y ago
That page could be titled "Advantages of Zig," and it seems to me rather normal that a developer might ask "What are the advantages of Zig/Rust/Python/D over other languages?" and each language has a cost/benefit analysis that is different than what other languages made. I do think justification is useful though - Why should one use Rust, for instance? Well, one obvious answer is that it places a high priority on memory safety, and so, if memory safety is a critical concern, Rust should be something to look at. I am also thinking of the xkcd comic on specifications, and how creating a new one merely confuses the already crowded space, but I'm having trouble making the corollary here.
Gibbon1 3y ago
I'm really unlikely at this point to use zig or even less likely to use rust. But as an embedded firmware guy I'm happy to see people working again to advance the state of the art of actual low level compiled languages. That stopped in the early 90's when we went off the rails with Java and C++ OOP madness. So it's nice to see it again.
dandigangi 3y ago
This is a good way to look at it. Definitely would say with the size of the landscape makes pro/con comparisons a necessity.
cmrdporcupine 3y ago
I agree and as a person working full time in Rust there are a lot of things in Zig I'm jealous of. I'm now at the "somewhat disillusioned" phase of working in Rust and if I wasn't so heavily buried in Rust projects (both personally and professionally) I'd consider starting a project in Zig. Well, mostly Cargo and Crates.io are my complaints around Rust. But also the lack of progress on allocator-api, and portable SIMD. I would, however, really miss ADTs/pattern-matching if I made the switch to Zig.

EchoChamberMan 3y ago

That page could be titled "Advantages of Zig," and it seems to me rather normal that a developer might ask "What are the advantages of Zig/Rust/Python/D over other languages?" and each language has a cost/benefit analysis that is different than what other languages made. I do think justification is useful though - Why should one use Rust, for instance? Well, one obvious answer is that it places a high priority on memory safety, and so, if memory safety is a critical concern, Rust should be something to look at. I am also thinking of the xkcd comic on specifications, and how creating a new one merely confuses the already crowded space, but I'm having trouble making the corollary here.

Gibbon1 3y ago

I'm really unlikely at this point to use zig or even less likely to use rust. But as an embedded firmware guy I'm happy to see people working again to advance the state of the art of actual low level compiled languages. That stopped in the early 90's when we went off the rails with Java and C++ OOP madness. So it's nice to see it again.

dandigangi 3y ago

This is a good way to look at it. Definitely would say with the size of the landscape makes pro/con comparisons a necessity.

cmrdporcupine 3y ago

I agree and as a person working full time in Rust there are a lot of things in Zig I'm jealous of. I'm now at the "somewhat disillusioned" phase of working in Rust and if I wasn't so heavily buried in Rust projects (both personally and professionally) I'd consider starting a project in Zig. Well, mostly Cargo and Crates.io are my complaints around Rust. But also the lack of progress on allocator-api, and portable SIMD. I would, however, really miss ADTs/pattern-matching if I made the switch to Zig.