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Complex subject, beautifully simple to read. Congrats to the author. Also: I love that super passionate people still exist, and are willing to challenge the st
by robinhood 1y ago
Complex subject, beautifully simple to read. Congrats to the author.
Also: I love that super passionate people still exist, and are willing to challenge the statut quo by attacking really hard things - things I don't have the brain to even think about. It's not normal that we have better computers each month and slower softwares. If only everyone (myself included) were better at writing more efficient code.
- ljm 1y agoI didn’t know it was written in Zig. That’s a fascinating choice to me given how young the language is. Amazing to see it being used in a practical way in production.
- robinhood 1y agoZig was created in 2016 though - almost 10 years at this point. Perhaps the surprise here is that we are not as exposed to this language on well-known and established projects as other languages like Rust, Go and C.
- pdpi 1y agoZig is still at the 0.x stage, and there's still a bunch of churn going on on really basic stuff like IO and memory allocation. I really enjoy writing it, but it's by no means stable to the point many people would write production software in it.
- ivanjermakov 1y agoTo be fair, Zig 10 years ago is drastically different language from Zig today.
- ojosilva 1y agoWhich is unfortunately a problem for AI trained on Zig, it makes some AI-assisted Zig coding more challenging, like Q&A and code-completion. It's sad that this glass-ceiling has been enacted for new languages and frameworks, not a deal-breaker at all, just that suddenly there's this penalty on time-to-deliver on anything Zig. But then... the same issue exists when hiring good programmers for lesser-known tech. There'll probably be a strategy (AEO?) for this in the future for newcomers and the underrepresented, like endless examples posted by a sane AI to their docs and github for instance so it gets picked up by training sets or live, tool calling, web-searches.
- rererereferred 1y agoYes, I wouldn't train AI on Zig code just yet. But here's a radical idea, rename the language the moment it hits 1.0: all documentation, blog posts, discussions, SO answers and LLMs for older versions gets automatically voided. For future languages, maybe it's better to already have a dev name and a release name from the get go.
- dwattttt 1y agoRust hit 1.0 in 2015, it started as a project by Graydon Hoare in 2006; those dates line up pretty well with Zig's timeline.
- epolanski 1y agoThe language is very in development but it's ecosystem and tooling are absolutely mature.
- ivanjermakov 1y agoI would not say that ecosystem is mature. Outside of superb C interop and popular C/C++ lib wrappers.
- epolanski 1y agoWhat would you say that the ecosystem lacks that C has?
- ivanjermakov 1y agoVarious native Zig libraries. While C interop is great, converting between C types and calling convention is rather not convenient.