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This article works really well to illustrate a question I have: why is Zig so popular in posts here? For most languages I can usually see one or two “killer fe

This article works really well to illustrate a question I have: why is Zig so popular in posts here? For most languages I can usually see one or two “killer features” that push the language: For Rust is taking C space with memory safety + modern semantics, for Go is being easy to learn by most engineers + parallelization, for Ruby is ergonomics… I don’t see any similar pitch for zig other than a general “I kinda enjoy it”, and the language seems to have a couple red flags, so why focus on it? (Honest question).

munificent 1y ago
> for Ruby is ergonomics… My impression is that this is the main thing for Zig too. The intersection of the set of languages that let you write very low-level code where you have full control over memory and allocation and the set of languages that are enjoyable to program in is pretty small. C is in there if you've internalized many of its warts are fine with all of the many many footguns it has. C++ is in there if you much of your enjoyment comes from the machismo of feeling like you have conquered C++'s beastly language complexity. Rust is in there if proving to the compiler that you know what you're doing is satisfying to you. Zig sort of gets out of your way like C does, even when what you're trying to do is potentially harmful. But it's more modern and expressive and doesn't have all of C's historical baggage.
- torben-friis 1y ago
  Ok, that makes sense. So it’s a modern take on low level languages, like rust, but for those that dislike c for being cumbersome rather than for being less secure? Is that a stated goal of the language? Other than the feature to gradually move from c++ it wasn’t super clear from the main pitch.
  - munificent 1y ago
    > for those that dislike c for being cumbersome rather than for being less secure? I wouldn't say "cumbersome", but perhaps "full of warts and historical baggage". They have some more details here: https://ziglang.org/learn/why_zig_rust_d_cpp/ https://ziglang.org/learn/why_zig_rust_d_cpp/
xanthor 1y ago
Low abstraction overhead and no ‘big ideas’. It tries to simplify the problem of low-level systems programming by learning from the lessons of the past 50 years.
mtlynch 1y ago
I'm a casual fan of Zig for hobby development, so just as a data point: I find Zig to be a pleasant option for code that requires high performance. I find it strictly dominates C as an option, as Zig outperforms C on every criteria I care about in a language's developer experience. I often see people compare Zig to Rust and complain that Zig doesn't have Rust's safety guarantees. I don't know Rust, but looking at it casually, the language itself seems to have a lot of complexity that doesn't appeal to me, and I'd still prefer Zig to Rust. If I need memory safety, I'd rather write in Go or Python. When I read articles like these, the gotchas they find don't seem that compelling to me. It's always like if you write your code in a deliberately confusing way to confuse the compiler, you can get incorrect results, but I don't care because I would never write code like that.
xlii 1y ago
For me, personally, it is nice because it's bare metal where I want it and not bare metal when I don't. C is very basic and (especially when you stick to something like C99), can be very tedious to write. In C, if I hope for smarter things I need to write them by hand; usually there are no ways of achieving some goals without just crunching out the code. Zig preserves C qualities but also gives some extra tools that are completely optional and makes it less tedious than C. I believe that Zig's popularity is also caused by general tendency of some people. Some prefer to fix a segfault than spend half a day refactoring something that was supposed to be easy but is causing half of the codebase to be rewritten. (Oh, and Zig is also an escape hatch to easy CGo :))
salamanderman 1y ago
I think the post gives an answer to this with "due to Zig's fairly minimalistic nature; it lacks a lot of features that one would otherwise use to solve problems. Of course, this is the appeal for many, but still". I have a lot of C/C++ experience, and they're what I reach for, but I often want C to be a little more like C++, and I often want both to have slightly better memory management, and I've never liked the different syntax for the main language, templates, and pre compiler macros. I also agree with Zig's dogmatic stance on no hidden control flow; I have been bitten by "magic" too many times.
xeonmc 1y ago
Zig for me is “C with namespaces”. Other selling points are just complimentary.
kristoff_it 1y ago
Some people like Zig because it makes it easier to learn how to program the machine sitting in front of them. It's better at that than Rust because it's less abstracted, and it's better at that than C because you don't have to worry all the toolchain nonsense / weird conventions / weak type system of the C ecosystem. As a small example wrt Rust: resetting an arraylist/vector while reusing its memory is a weirdly complicated trick https://lobste.rs/s/emvkea/why_we_didn_t_rewrite_our_feed_handler_rust#c_yjqhxq https://lobste.rs/s/emvkea/why_we_didn_t_rewrite_our_feed_ha... I think I don't need to provide references for C. It's a new pathway to mastery that really works well for some people. That in itself is much more valuable than any new specific feature the language has to offer, although the ability of the toolchain to cross-compile reliably not only Zig but also C and C++ code does play into that. And, while not yet 100% there, instant incremental rebuilds also help to achieve faster feedback loops. People like Zig because it's a tool that helps them become better programmers, faster.
- metaltyphoon 1y ago
  > As a small example wrt Rust: resetting an arraylist/vector while reusing its memory is a weirdly complicated trick https://lobste.rs/s/emvkea/why_we_didn_t_rewrite_our_feed_ha https://lobste.rs/s/emvkea/why_we_didn_t_rewrite_our_feed_ha... Nitpicking? Let’s show an example on creating an interface in Zig to see all complicated tricks.
- NobodyNada 1y ago
  > As a small example wrt Rust: resetting an arraylist/vector while reusing its memory is a weirdly complicated trick A bit of a nitpick here: the trick is for creating a new vector of a different type, that reuses the allocation of an existing vector, using only safe code. "Resetting an arraylist/vector while reusing its memory" is just vec.clear() if you're not changing the type. And it's trivial to change the type of a vector with unsafe (the docs even have examples of this); the only advantage of the "trick" is to ensure you'll get a panic if you screw up the alignment of the types. And after that blog post, the Rust team accepted a proposal to introduce a vec.recycle() function to change the type of a vector without needing that trick (and with compile-time checks for alignment compatibility): https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/148416 https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/148416 But that example aside, I agree with your overall premise -- Zig and Rust share different design goals here, and Zig's lower level of abstraction makes it more approachable to learn than a language like Rust.
tayo42 1y ago
With all the hn hype around zig I ended up going through the docs and some example code and felt the same way. I'm not totally sure where this fits into my tool box of languages.
- pyrolistical 1y ago
  When I first heard about zig, I sat down and read the entire doc from start to end. It was so refreshing and was an instant fan
  - tayo42 1y ago
    It doesn't seem bad, (though with some of rewrite of the std library? It doesn't seem quite ready) Im just not sure when I'll reach for it. I guess I'm comfortable enough with rust and both seem like languages that compile with llvm. Maybe if I didn't know rust it would feel like more useful.
pron 1y ago
Turns out that "killer features" are frequently not killer enough. You mentioned Rust with its memory-safety killer-feature, and yet Rust is quite old now (about as old as Java was when JDK 6 came out or JS was when jQuery came out) and its adoption rate is low for such an old age. I have no idea if Zig will be successful or not, but even if you look just at memory safety, I think it does a better job at that than Rust. If you look at MITRE's top 25 dangerous weaknesses [1] or top 10 exploited weaknesses [2], you'll see that Rust spends almost all of its complexity on eliminating weaknesses that don't even make the top 5 on either list, while Zig's more limited memory safety addresses the more dangerous memory-safety-related problems without paying so dearly to solve less severe issues. Now, I personally think that Zig's combination of expressivity and simplicity, while still being low-level, is an unprecedented killer feature (I wrote more about it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45852774 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45852774) which makes the language design quite revolutionary and fascinating. This could perhaps translate to correctness benefits. [1]: https://cwe.mitre.org/top25/archive/2024/2024_cwe_top25.html https://cwe.mitre.org/top25/archive/2024/2024_cwe_top25.html [2]: https://cwe.mitre.org/top25/archive/2024/2024_kev_list.html https://cwe.mitre.org/top25/archive/2024/2024_kev_list.html
- pizza234 1y ago
  > Rust spends almost all of its complexity on eliminating weaknesses that don't even make the top 5 in either list Uh? Number 2 in CWE is an out-of-bounds write, and the same vulnerability is number 1 in the KEV list.
  - pron 1y ago
    That falls into "spatial" memory safety, which Zig also provides. Rust's ownership and lifetime - the core of its design - go into eliminating use-after-free, aka "temporal" memory safety.
- grogers 1y ago
  Use after free is number 8 and 9 on the lists respectively... Not like it's way down the list. And most of the things the things above it (other than out of bounds writes/reads which you addressed in another comment) are not something I would consider a programming language can directly affect (e.g. SQL injection, CSRF)
cassepipe 1y ago
A lot of people strive for something that is simple (not like Rust, and I am not only talking about the borrow checker) and explicit ("debug your program, not your knowledge of the language) but also doesn't bear the historical cruft and idiosyncrasies of C. The fact that it can integrate with C code means that if you are already using C you can adopt it incrementally, plus it works as a build system and cross-compiler and I believe a package manager too. So to sum up : A powerful C without the quirks that manages to keep things simple but is also a batteries-included experience with a smooth adoption path. What's not to love ?
raincole 1y ago
> for Ruby is ergonomics… In other words, "I kinda enjoy it"?
JuniperMesos 1y ago
It's doing something novel in the systems programming space, and makes a bunch of different trade-offs compared to Rust. That's interesting, even if you might reasonably conclude that Rust is still a better language to use in most cases. It's good to explore different corners of the programming language design space. Every single commonly-used programming language has a couple red flags, often much more than a couple. Javascript, C, C++, Go, Python - these languages all have serious flaws and are nonetheless used by extremely large numbers of people for all sorts of tasks.

munificent 1y ago

> for Ruby is ergonomics… My impression is that this is the main thing for Zig too. The intersection of the set of languages that let you write very low-level code where you have full control over memory and allocation and the set of languages that are enjoyable to program in is pretty small. C is in there if you've internalized many of its warts are fine with all of the many many footguns it has. C++ is in there if you much of your enjoyment comes from the machismo of feeling like you have conquered C++'s beastly language complexity. Rust is in there if proving to the compiler that you know what you're doing is satisfying to you. Zig sort of gets out of your way like C does, even when what you're trying to do is potentially harmful. But it's more modern and expressive and doesn't have all of C's historical baggage.

torben-friis 1y ago
Ok, that makes sense. So it’s a modern take on low level languages, like rust, but for those that dislike c for being cumbersome rather than for being less secure? Is that a stated goal of the language? Other than the feature to gradually move from c++ it wasn’t super clear from the main pitch.
- munificent 1y ago
  > for those that dislike c for being cumbersome rather than for being less secure? I wouldn't say "cumbersome", but perhaps "full of warts and historical baggage". They have some more details here: https://ziglang.org/learn/why_zig_rust_d_cpp/ https://ziglang.org/learn/why_zig_rust_d_cpp/

xanthor 1y ago

Low abstraction overhead and no ‘big ideas’. It tries to simplify the problem of low-level systems programming by learning from the lessons of the past 50 years.

mtlynch 1y ago

I'm a casual fan of Zig for hobby development, so just as a data point: I find Zig to be a pleasant option for code that requires high performance. I find it strictly dominates C as an option, as Zig outperforms C on every criteria I care about in a language's developer experience. I often see people compare Zig to Rust and complain that Zig doesn't have Rust's safety guarantees. I don't know Rust, but looking at it casually, the language itself seems to have a lot of complexity that doesn't appeal to me, and I'd still prefer Zig to Rust. If I need memory safety, I'd rather write in Go or Python. When I read articles like these, the gotchas they find don't seem that compelling to me. It's always like if you write your code in a deliberately confusing way to confuse the compiler, you can get incorrect results, but I don't care because I would never write code like that.

xlii 1y ago

For me, personally, it is nice because it's bare metal where I want it and not bare metal when I don't. C is very basic and (especially when you stick to something like C99), can be very tedious to write. In C, if I hope for smarter things I need to write them by hand; usually there are no ways of achieving some goals without just crunching out the code. Zig preserves C qualities but also gives some extra tools that are completely optional and makes it less tedious than C. I believe that Zig's popularity is also caused by general tendency of some people. Some prefer to fix a segfault than spend half a day refactoring something that was supposed to be easy but is causing half of the codebase to be rewritten. (Oh, and Zig is also an escape hatch to easy CGo :))

salamanderman 1y ago

I think the post gives an answer to this with "due to Zig's fairly minimalistic nature; it lacks a lot of features that one would otherwise use to solve problems. Of course, this is the appeal for many, but still". I have a lot of C/C++ experience, and they're what I reach for, but I often want C to be a little more like C++, and I often want both to have slightly better memory management, and I've never liked the different syntax for the main language, templates, and pre compiler macros. I also agree with Zig's dogmatic stance on no hidden control flow; I have been bitten by "magic" too many times.

xeonmc 1y ago

Zig for me is “C with namespaces”. Other selling points are just complimentary.

kristoff_it 1y ago

Some people like Zig because it makes it easier to learn how to program the machine sitting in front of them. It's better at that than Rust because it's less abstracted, and it's better at that than C because you don't have to worry all the toolchain nonsense / weird conventions / weak type system of the C ecosystem. As a small example wrt Rust: resetting an arraylist/vector while reusing its memory is a weirdly complicated trick https://lobste.rs/s/emvkea/why_we_didn_t_rewrite_our_feed_handler_rust#c_yjqhxq https://lobste.rs/s/emvkea/why_we_didn_t_rewrite_our_feed_ha... I think I don't need to provide references for C. It's a new pathway to mastery that really works well for some people. That in itself is much more valuable than any new specific feature the language has to offer, although the ability of the toolchain to cross-compile reliably not only Zig but also C and C++ code does play into that. And, while not yet 100% there, instant incremental rebuilds also help to achieve faster feedback loops. People like Zig because it's a tool that helps them become better programmers, faster.

metaltyphoon 1y ago
> As a small example wrt Rust: resetting an arraylist/vector while reusing its memory is a weirdly complicated trick https://lobste.rs/s/emvkea/why_we_didn_t_rewrite_our_feed_ha https://lobste.rs/s/emvkea/why_we_didn_t_rewrite_our_feed_ha... Nitpicking? Let’s show an example on creating an interface in Zig to see all complicated tricks.
NobodyNada 1y ago
> As a small example wrt Rust: resetting an arraylist/vector while reusing its memory is a weirdly complicated trick A bit of a nitpick here: the trick is for creating a new vector of a different type, that reuses the allocation of an existing vector, using only safe code. "Resetting an arraylist/vector while reusing its memory" is just vec.clear() if you're not changing the type. And it's trivial to change the type of a vector with unsafe (the docs even have examples of this); the only advantage of the "trick" is to ensure you'll get a panic if you screw up the alignment of the types. And after that blog post, the Rust team accepted a proposal to introduce a vec.recycle() function to change the type of a vector without needing that trick (and with compile-time checks for alignment compatibility): https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/148416 https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/148416 But that example aside, I agree with your overall premise -- Zig and Rust share different design goals here, and Zig's lower level of abstraction makes it more approachable to learn than a language like Rust.

tayo42 1y ago

With all the hn hype around zig I ended up going through the docs and some example code and felt the same way. I'm not totally sure where this fits into my tool box of languages.

pyrolistical 1y ago
When I first heard about zig, I sat down and read the entire doc from start to end. It was so refreshing and was an instant fan
- tayo42 1y ago
  It doesn't seem bad, (though with some of rewrite of the std library? It doesn't seem quite ready) Im just not sure when I'll reach for it. I guess I'm comfortable enough with rust and both seem like languages that compile with llvm. Maybe if I didn't know rust it would feel like more useful.

pron 1y ago

Turns out that "killer features" are frequently not killer enough. You mentioned Rust with its memory-safety killer-feature, and yet Rust is quite old now (about as old as Java was when JDK 6 came out or JS was when jQuery came out) and its adoption rate is low for such an old age. I have no idea if Zig will be successful or not, but even if you look just at memory safety, I think it does a better job at that than Rust. If you look at MITRE's top 25 dangerous weaknesses [1] or top 10 exploited weaknesses [2], you'll see that Rust spends almost all of its complexity on eliminating weaknesses that don't even make the top 5 on either list, while Zig's more limited memory safety addresses the more dangerous memory-safety-related problems without paying so dearly to solve less severe issues. Now, I personally think that Zig's combination of expressivity and simplicity, while still being low-level, is an unprecedented killer feature (I wrote more about it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45852774 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45852774) which makes the language design quite revolutionary and fascinating. This could perhaps translate to correctness benefits. [1]: https://cwe.mitre.org/top25/archive/2024/2024_cwe_top25.html https://cwe.mitre.org/top25/archive/2024/2024_cwe_top25.html [2]: https://cwe.mitre.org/top25/archive/2024/2024_kev_list.html https://cwe.mitre.org/top25/archive/2024/2024_kev_list.html

pizza234 1y ago
> Rust spends almost all of its complexity on eliminating weaknesses that don't even make the top 5 in either list Uh? Number 2 in CWE is an out-of-bounds write, and the same vulnerability is number 1 in the KEV list.
- pron 1y ago
  That falls into "spatial" memory safety, which Zig also provides. Rust's ownership and lifetime - the core of its design - go into eliminating use-after-free, aka "temporal" memory safety.
grogers 1y ago
Use after free is number 8 and 9 on the lists respectively... Not like it's way down the list. And most of the things the things above it (other than out of bounds writes/reads which you addressed in another comment) are not something I would consider a programming language can directly affect (e.g. SQL injection, CSRF)

cassepipe 1y ago

A lot of people strive for something that is simple (not like Rust, and I am not only talking about the borrow checker) and explicit ("debug your program, not your knowledge of the language) but also doesn't bear the historical cruft and idiosyncrasies of C. The fact that it can integrate with C code means that if you are already using C you can adopt it incrementally, plus it works as a build system and cross-compiler and I believe a package manager too. So to sum up : A powerful C without the quirks that manages to keep things simple but is also a batteries-included experience with a smooth adoption path. What's not to love ?

raincole 1y ago

> for Ruby is ergonomics… In other words, "I kinda enjoy it"?

JuniperMesos 1y ago

It's doing something novel in the systems programming space, and makes a bunch of different trade-offs compared to Rust. That's interesting, even if you might reasonably conclude that Rust is still a better language to use in most cases. It's good to explore different corners of the programming language design space. Every single commonly-used programming language has a couple red flags, often much more than a couple. Javascript, C, C++, Go, Python - these languages all have serious flaws and are nonetheless used by extremely large numbers of people for all sorts of tasks.