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Why we built Lightpanda in Zig

• websiteapi 10mo ago
  has there ever been a project that became popular and/or successful because of its programming language? does it really matter to the end user what language it's in if it works well?
  • rudedogg 10mo ago
    The language tends to affect everything, but to give a quick Developer example there’s Zed. Developers use it because it’s fast. Same with Sublime Text. Your criticism makes more sense with products targeting non-technical users though. But IMO tech choices have cascading effects. I won’t buy a vehicle if the infotainment software sucks, and that’s the 2nd largest purchase I’ll ever make.
    • websiteapi 10mo ago
      zed is a great example. most people use vscode, that is javascript. which ai code editors are built from scratch that aren't forked vscode?
      • deleted 10mo ago
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      • rudedogg 10mo ago
        Just Zed (if AI features are a requirement) as far as I know. But to elaborate, they’ve found a niche simply by using Rust and rendering the GUI in a performant way on the GPU. I’m not saying performance is the only thing, but for a chunk of people it is something they care about.
        • data-ottawa 10mo ago
          Good performance is a strong proxy for making other good software decisions. You generally don't get good performance if you haven't thought things through or planned for features in the long term.
    • sroussey 10mo ago
      I hate all infotainment systems, so I’m still on a car from 22 years ago — with no screen and ratting me out on how I drive to unknown entities. If I had the optional GPS screen from 22yr ago, I think I would have ripped it out and replaced it a bunch of times or just bought a new car. I’m curious to try the new iDrive 10. We will see…
  • CooCooCaCha 10mo ago
    This post is aimed at developers and hackernews is a technically focused forum. So I care as a developer. If language doesn’t matter then why not go build something in fortran or brainfuck?
    • grayhatter 10mo ago
      > If language doesn’t matter then why not go build something in fortran or brainfuck? Because if you're getting lunch, and someone suggests Burgers, Sushi, or Casu martzu. Only two are actually reasonable. Yes, yes, if I'm allergic to shellfish, I might want to make sure I have an EpiPen before getting sushi. But that doesn't mean it's a meaningful problem.
    • pklausler 10mo ago
      I really don't understand the disdain for Fortran on HN. While it's not the most well-defined or portable programming language in the world, it does its job pretty well for those who need it, and has more actively maintained implementations than any language I can think of apart from C.
  • aeve890 10mo ago
    Now that you mention it I think this is a new trend. I pretty sure I've seen more "written in Rust/Go/Zig" than any other language out there. I've never seen a post like "new cli, written in C++" for example. I don't know if it's just some kind of tribalism or a way to attract talent to your project. I think end users don't give a shit about the tech stack of a software. Why would they?
  • femiagbabiaka 10mo ago
    I think I'll take the side of no (as long as it's fast/safe/good) and also I never find the reasoning in these language comparisons to be that compelling anyways. A "why we like $FOO" is better than "why $FOO works better/is better for us than $BAR", since the latter is almost always going to be incomplete.
  • mitchellh 10mo ago
    There are second order effects. You definitely attract different types of talent depending on the technology stack of choice. And building the right group of talent around an early stage product/company is an extremely impactful thing on the product. And blogs are an impactful talent marketing source. This doesn't guarantee any sort of commercial success because there are so many follow on things that are important (product/market fit, sales, customer success, etc.) but it's pretty rough to succeed in the follow ons when the product itself is shit. For first order effects, if a product's target market is developer oriented, then marketing to things developers care about such as a programming language will help initial adoption. It can also help the tool get talked about more organically via user blogs, social media, word of mouth, etc. Basically, yeah, it matters, but as a cog in a big machine like all things.
    • RustSupremacist 10mo ago
      What does it say about your latest project that it attracts the most toxic types from Germany to China^? Are you even aware? Do you consider this "building the right group of talent" for your project? ^https://xcancel.com/QULuseslignux/status/1918296149724692968 https://xcancel.com/QULuseslignux/status/1918296149724692968
  • gorjusborg 10mo ago
    There's a big part of me that agrees with your implied conclusion, that it shouldn't matter. On the other hand, I've found that core decisions like language ecosystem choice can be a good leading indicator of other seemingly unrelated decisions. When I see someone choose a tool that I think is extremely well suited for a purpose, it makes me curious to see what else we agree on. The Oven team, the ones who created the Bun runtime, is a good example for me. I think Zig is probably the best compromise out there right now, for my sensibilities. The Oven folks, who chose to use Zig to implement Bun, _also_ made a lot of product decisions I really agree with.
    • karmakaze 10mo ago
      This is one of my assessments/red-flags when interviewing with a company. Their tech stack/choices is a reflection of their engineering culture. If they chose Zig or Rust, I'd want to hear why that was a better choice than using a gc'd language.
      • Milpotel 10mo ago
        > If they chose Zig or Rust, I'd want to hear why that was a better choice than using a gc'd language. Come on, they advertise with benchmarks hence it's quite obvious why they didn't chose a gc'd language.
        • karmakaze 10mo ago
          Oh yes I know they do in this post, I meant more generally. Even myself I often wish I had a need to use a lower-level, cooler language, but the pragmatic side of me just can't justify it.
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  • yahoozoo2 10mo ago
    [dead]
  • cgh 10mo ago
    https://paulgraham.com/avg.html https://paulgraham.com/avg.html Paul Graham is one of the founders of Y Combinator, the company that hosts Hacker News.
  • karmakaze 10mo ago
    Yes. I don't think Linux would have succeeded if written in a language other than C. Today is a different story. Yes it matters to me as an end user if my web browser is more or less likely to have vulnerabilities in it. Choice of programming language has an impact on that. It doesn't have to be Rust, I'd use a browser written in Pony. If I were making something that had to be low-level and not have security bugs, my statement would be: > I’m not smart enough to build a big multi-threaded project in a manual memory-managed language that doesn't have vulnerabilities. I want help from the language & compiler. The size and longevity of the team matters a lot too. The larger it gets the more problematic it is to keep the bugs out.
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  • Milpotel 10mo ago
    The opposite is true: there are a lot of projects that failed because of the chosen language.
    • OnionBlender 10mo ago
      What are some famous examples?
      • Milpotel 10mo ago
        Eclipse, Azureus, Minecraft, MySpace with ColdFusion, OpenOffice's Java parts...
        • DANmode 10mo ago
          These are the failed projects?!
          • Milpotel 10mo ago
            These are the "famous" failed projects. All of them lost most of their user base or required a rewrite or lost to a faster competitor.
        • metaltyphoon 10mo ago
          > Minecraft Typo?
          • Milpotel 10mo ago
            Why? It's horrendously slow thanks to the wrong language choice and also required a rewrite (bedrock).
  • 9rx 10mo ago
    Most seem to agree that NeXTSTEP/macOS/iOS wouldn't have succeeded without Objective-C. So much of the functionality that made it stand out was predicated on Objective-C's somewhat unique programming model. Of course, it's all just 1s and 0s at the end of the day. You can ultimately accomplish the same in any language. But the design of the language does shape the way developers end up thinking about the problems. If NeXT had used, say, C++ instead, it is unlikely that the people involved would have ever come to recognize the same possibilities.
  • ok123456 10mo ago
    Ruby on Rails.
  • DanielHB 10mo ago
    There have been some large scale companies that went under because of platforms chosen to develop their products in. First that comes to mind is MySpace with Dreamweaver.
• lvl155 10mo ago
  This is actually a great summary of Zig. I am with the author: I am too old and stupid to use Rust properly. Whenever I watch someone like Gjengset write Rust, I realize I am doing it wrong.
  • simonask 10mo ago
    I am too old and stupid to not use Rust. I’m kidding of course, but the mental load of doing the things we used do in C++ is really noticeable once it’s gone.
    • dnautics 10mo ago
      honestly manually tracing lifetimes of pointers is not as hard in zig as C and definitely easier than C++. it would be nice to know for sure but for small and medium sized programs it's not a that hard? and not even "cheating" using arenas
      • simonask 10mo ago
        It was never hard for small things. The hard part is when you have multiple people working on something, who all need to synchronize their mental model of all lifetimes in the project, or even in your own code when you come back to it in 3 months. Encoding this stuff in the type system is unbelievably useful. Zig improves a lot of things, and seems like a pleasant language in general, but this isn't a problem that it does anything to solve.
        • dnautics 10mo ago
          and for big teams you can run a checker: (wip) http://github.com/ityonemo/clr http://github.com/ityonemo/clr
• observationist 10mo ago
  I'd like to see a setup with Lightpanda feeding a local/private AI, with content rendered post-curation. You could filter out all the garbage at the intake, instead of doing all the plug-ins, extensions, add-ons, DNS and whackamole arms race. AI researchers need to hurry up and invent the next big paradigm shift so AI on your phone is as good as SoTA bots, so we can stay ahead of the enshittification curve. Awesome software - I've been meaning to build a crawler and this does the trick.
  • francisbouvier 10mo ago
    Author and founder here. Thank you!
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• mustpax 10mo ago
  I feel like I’m missing something. How do people justify the security implications of manual memory management when building a publicly accessible web service with Zig?
  • ridiculous_leke 10mo ago
    In practice aren't such services behind a reverse proxy/WAF? The other day I found an endpoint in the wild outputting a DB table. I tried fuzzing it to gather more evidence of a SQL injection vuln but my attempts were flagged by AWS WAF.
  • Svoka 10mo ago
    No, you don't. Lets be honest Zig is a shiny new shit for people who doesn't want to learn and want everything to be familiar but new. Criticism of it is not allowed and would be downvoted by bandwagon fanboys.
    • xpe 10mo ago
      I downvoted because I'm interested in charitable, non-disparaging conversation. I post this so the above commenter doesn't confuse a downvote (1 bit of information) as validation of their claim. I'm personally uninterested in spending much time looking at Zig right now, but I'm keeping an eye on it and generally interested in the progression of languages over time.
    • PedroBatista 10mo ago
      That might be true or not. But I’m sure you’re aware your post didn’t offer anything constructive and for that reason alone should be downvoted. Familiar is different from the same, therefore is new. And zig has many new concepts and things different from C
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  • hansvm 10mo ago
    Just don't write bugs ;) More seriously, a reasonably sane way to create a lot of web-heavy services (writing out something simple for brevity, not anything perfect) is with large regions partitioned into ropes (for use with, e.g., iovecs kernel APIs). You have a tiny bit of potentially memory-unsafe stuff in a simple backing data structure (or not -- at $WORK we're moving more things to static allocation models for a host of other benefits), and then everything else you do web-wise is with views into those ropes (enabling incremental processing and whatnot if you care). The rest is memory-safe by definition (only using slices and other such safe techniques), so if you have any memory bugs from there then they're the same logic bugs you can write in any language (a fairly classic example in a web context is serving another user's data, especially by not resetting view states, but that's also not what happens in a "normal" Zig program because the compiler will yell at you when you miss some fields). You might notice that my answer seemingly wasn't Zig-specific. You can use that same architecture in C. Why is Zig safe? It's a lot of little things -- first-class errors, defer and errdefer statements, first-class tests and fuzzing, the existence of a built-in fat pointer type, etc. If you propose the same idea in C you'll likely screw up a detail somewhere (not checking an error, not using yet another fat pointer implementation for ergonomic reasons, whatever). In Zig you'll write safe code by default. There are other architectures, other ways to ensure safety, and other things the compiler does to keep you on the straight and narrow. You could go fairly deep into the "why" and "how" of Zig being safe enough. I'll leave that chore for somebody else. The other half of your question though is "what do you gain?" You gain lots of things, and they might not matter to you, but they probably exist. One thing I encountered was needing a faster language and not being able to justify the huge ramp-up time to teach Rust to a bunch of Pythonistas (nor the ramp-up time on the company if we tried to hire explicitly for that work, even if we could have gotten the additional budget). You also gain access to really world-class programmers. There are great programmers in every language, but in established languages they're a lot harder to find in any given job search (Not talking about any of you here on HN of course :) The point is that resumés have a sampling bias from the perspective of the receiving company favoring people who struggle to get jobs, and for a variety of reasons that gives you a much higher signal-to-noise ratio when hiring for less popular languages). This was true of Rust at one point too, but IMO it's a little harder to hire for now (yet still better than even more popular languages). As a broader point, for somewhat nebulous reasons I don't fully understand yet, it's by far the easiest language I've personally found for writing high-performance software correctly. C/C++/Rust/etc were fine enough I guess (all of them more than fine in other problem domains -- I've used them professionally and don't have too many complaints that other practitioners would disagree with), but they were comparatively hard to use to write code that was anywhere near optimal for complicated problems.
• gorjusborg 10mo ago
  Years ago, when I initially picked up Rust, I loved it. It does a lot of things right. At the same time, though, I knew there was a possibility of it going wrong in two opposite directions: 1. Developers balked at being required to take on the cognitive load required to allow GC-less memory management 2. Developers wore their ability to take on that cognitive load as a badge of honor, despite it not being in their best interest I eventually came to the decision to stop developing in Rust, despite its popularity. It is really cool that its creators pulled it off. It was quite an achievement, given how different it was when it came out. I think that if I had to implement a critical library I would consider using Rust for it, but as a general programming language I want something that allows me to focus my mental facilities on the complexities of the actual problem domain, and I felt that it was too often too difficult to do that with Rust.
  • azaras 10mo ago
    What are you developing in?
    • gorjusborg 10mo ago
      Depends on the problem at hand. Zig where I used to use C/Rust (but admittedly I spent the least time here). Go where I used to use Java. Bun/Node for typescript/javascript, where each is appropriate, but I favor Bun for standalone application programming and local scripting.
      • littlestymaar 10mo ago
        > Zig where I used to use C/Rust (but admittedly I spent the least time here). I really don't understand how that fit with the “I want something that allows me to focus my mental facilities on the complexities of the actual problem domain”. For low-level stuff, Rust allows to offload the cognitive load of maintaining the ownership requirements to the machine. On the opposite, Zig is exactly like C as it forces you to think about it all the time or you just shoot yourself in the foot at the first opportunity… For stuff that can be done with managed languages, then absolutely, the GC allows to completely ignore that aspect, at the cost of some performance you don't always care about because how fast the modern hardware is.
• motoboi 10mo ago
  I'm starting to form an image of the zig community: people that like to write and reason, nice typography, videogame inspired visuals.
  • brabel 10mo ago
    Agree, it's funny to see how that seems to be developing organically!
• drnick1 10mo ago
  I have seen this time and time again: first complain that C/C++ are too complex or lack feature X, new language is proposed, then sooner or later people find out that's it's not fast, expressive, flexible enough or imposes a nonstandard way of doing things (Rust), then back to C/C++ and few years after the cycle repeats.
  • cgh 10mo ago
    Most of the article is about why they didn’t use C or C++.
  • UncleEntity 10mo ago
    Back in the day, before I had our robot overlords to write code for me, I would just use C++ as a fancy C with classes and a larger standard library. Or Boost as they have some fun and exciting things to play with. Now, the robots do a good enough job at writing clean C++ without going too crazy that I just kind of let them do their thing and review the very readable code to keep them on the right path. I can't even imagine the nightmare with something like a browser where you'd be pulling in C++ dependencies from all over the place and each having their own way of doing things. I mean, I get annoyed when C libs don't do the 'object to be operated on' as the first argument to functions so they can't be trivially wrapped in Python C-API extensions super easily using generators. --edit-- Actually, this got me thinking, I was exploring using zig for a project (might still do, dunno) and came up with this meta-circular comptime peg grammar 'evaluator' to generate, at compile time, the parser for the peg grammar used to generate the parser for the runtime peg generator tool. Admittedly, I was pretty high when I cooked up this scheme with the robots but it seems to be viable...
• loxodrome 10mo ago
  I just want Zig with classes, Zig++. :(
  • Mond_ 10mo ago
    What exactly do you need that Zig doesn't have? Inheritance?
    • cgh 10mo ago
      Proper interfaces would be nice. I realize that eg tagged unions work for most cases but the syntactic sugar would reduce a bit of friction.
      • smj-edison 10mo ago
        What form of interfaces would you want? Something trait-based? Rust's orphan rule has bitten me many times now, and it causes consolidation around certain libraries. Something like Go's interface, where the signature just needs to match? That would be nicer than the current situation with `anytype`, but I don't know if it's better enough to justify a full interface system. Curious to hear your thoughts.
        • cgh 10mo ago
          Essentially enough syntactic sugar so you could write eg the Allocator interface without manually specifying the vtable and the opaque pointer. But yeah, Go’s system is nice and simple. I am not sure, but I think the fact that Zig programs are a single compilation unit might have some bearing on the orphan rule. There is no concept of crates so “traits”/interfaces can be defined and implemented anywhere.
          • smj-edison 10mo ago
            That's a good point that it's all a single compilation unit which removes the orphan rule problem, but it still has the issue that there could be multiple different implementations of a trait, each from a different dependency. Though, I am seeing your point on a simple interface system that would be enough to have something like the allocater interface, or the hash map interface.
• jkelleyrtp 10mo ago
  I mean you can opine about how Rust isn't suited for browser development, but as someone building a browser in Rust, I think it's just fine. If anything, Rust has been really shining in this project since Rust was designed to build a web browser. https://github.com/dioxuslabs/blitz https://github.com/dioxuslabs/blitz Also I think it's a little ridiculous to build yet another new browser in a new language when so many amazing pieces are just sitting around ready for someone to use. Come contribute, we're already much further along :) https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz/pull/292 https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz/pull/292
  • stefanka 10mo ago
    I’m really excited for blitz, thanks for this amazing project. Do you intend to wipe a full fledged browser out of it?
    • jkelleyrtp 10mo ago
      The browser UI will likely be more of a cool demonstration of the project instead of the end goal. We want blitz to exist to help make it easier to build stuff like lightpanda. There's a whole world of interesting browser forks that could exist but don't, and being able to easily remix the browser opens the door to new stuff like AI automation, hybrid native gui frameworks, better accessibility tools, etc.
  • zem 10mo ago
    agreed about rust literally being designed to build a browser, but when it was developed there were many amazing pieces sitting around in c++ :) let the zig folks have a go at building their own ecosystem.
    • jkelleyrtp 10mo ago
      That's why Rust was introduced into Firefox piece by piece. The goal wasn't to rewrite firefox in Rust - just to migrate the scary bits over to a memory safe lang. You can feel a lot of that in the servo codebase, weird pointer semantics as a result of needing to be API compatible with the C++ adapters. If I were building a company around a new browser, I'd reach for the solid stuff that can be pulled in. Our whole blitz project is designed to be modular exactly for that use-case.
• Svoka 10mo ago
  I was using C++ and C for decades, and I do a lot of embedded programming for fun. I switched completely to Rust about half a year ago. Friction went away very fast. Fun thing is that looking at my old C code now I see so many pitfalls I was oblivious about, just because I started to use Rust. I mean, Rust does have a learning curve, but its complexity is overexaggerated imo. Yes, you have to learn something new, but how it is a problem? I don't understand why pick language because it looks familiar and you don't have to change how you think. For me that is basically a problem with Zig - I can do everything Zig does in C++, having decades of libraries and infra while Rust actually contributes to the end product.
• 0xbadcafebee 10mo ago
  Keep in mind you'll be using a different language in the future. All software is maintained for a given amount of time and then sunset. What matters is the lifecycle of the thing you're making now. Pick whatever is maintainable for that application and time frame. Throwaway script? Use anything. A mobile app? Whatever gets it on the devices you're targeting today, that works for the life of the device/OS/etc. A backend API that will power a large platform? Something maintainable (by people other than yourself) for 3-5 years. Firmware for IoT that will remain in industrial systems for 20 years? Something that is well established and supported with a good number of other people who can fix it in the long haul.
  • wilkystyle 10mo ago
    I like this take. While I've primarily lived in Python for much of my career (and I don't see that changing soon), I've tried to find reasons to use other languages in at least a hobby capacity so that I can (1) keep my learning muscles warmed up and (2) because they can often shape how I think about software in general. Like the Alan Perlis (I think) quote goes: "A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing."
    • macintux 10mo ago
      Unfortunately you can get spoiled by a good language. After using Erlang it took me far too long to get comfortable programming without immutability.
  • dangoor 10mo ago
    Something interesting about your comment is that HN also has a post today (https://tigerbeetle.com/blog/2025-10-25-synadia-and-tigerbeetle-pledge-512k-to-the-zig-software-foundation/ https://tigerbeetle.com/blog/2025-10-25-synadia-and-tigerbee...) about TigerBeetle's support for Zig and their reason for using Zig specifically talked about wanting something for a long time horizon: > Investing in creating a database like TigerBeetle is a long term effort. Databases tend to have a long half life (e.g. Postgres is 30 years old). And so, while Zig being early in 2020 did give me pause, nevertheless Zig’s quality, philosophy and simplicity made sense for a multi-decade horizon.
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• Svoka 10mo ago
  The biggest reason against Rust is 3 year old article from personal blog. Trying to reproduce benchmark result from it result in failure because Zig code fails to compile. Meanwhile Rust compiles just fine. Even updating toolchain to newest causes no issues and benchmark still runs. All I had to do is remove pinning to old toolchain, and bump language version to latest. Also changing dependency version to latest worked without an issue. You'd think that performing all advanced memory manipulations you would want all the safety you want, but hey. Zig is cool this days. Go figure.
  • donallen 10mo ago
    I've written a fair amount of code in Rust and D and a little less in Zig. In my opinion, Zig was not ready for prime time when I used it -- too many bugs -- and that may still be true. Rust is hard to learn and even after you do, it gets in the way a lot. D is very nice if you like C, but there are a lot of problems with the project and the tooling. I'm about to say something that will likely surprise you; it surprised me: have you folks thought about Ada? I was around, working on (D)ARPA contracts at BBN, when Ada was designed. We didn't use it, so I had no opinion of it at the time. I thought it had dried up and blown away in the decades since, like PL1. Well, it's now #17 on the Tiobe index and climbing. So I gave it a try for a small project. My reaction is very positive. The language is well-designed, obviously having learned a lot of lessons from the mistakes of C, among other things. The compiler, gnat, is built on gcc. Compilation times are very fast, execution times are fast, it works well with gdb, and it's well documented. It avoids many of the traps of C (no pointer arithmetic, no automatic type conversions) and it just feels carefully engineered. It's been used to build a lot of applications in areas like train control and aviation where you just can't screw up because people may die if you do. Based on my experience with writing and debugging a little over a thousand lines of code (so not a lot), I'm very impressed -- it's surprisingly good. I'd suggest giving it consideration if/when the opportunity presents itself.
• cloudhead 10mo ago
  > LLMs deserve a 100x better browser. Hold on, why can't humans have a 100x better browser?
  • kevinrineer 10mo ago
    Because you can't sell a better browser to LLM companies. That's their current business model.
  • apitman 10mo ago
    Because a human browser has to implement CSS.
• coppsilgold 10mo ago
  Lightpanda doesn't appear to be interested in impersonating a more popular browser. How will such a strategy not end in failure?
  • 0x1ch 10mo ago
    I didn't read much past their headline and blurb, but I don't think they're aiming to compete with normal browsers. This seems like a Selenium situation but with AI integration on top.
    • coppsilgold 10mo ago
      What did I say that suggested they intend to compete with a normal browser? Right now their browser is trivial to block, it provides no value that I can see. curl-impersonate is more useful than what they offer, at least it won't be stuck on captchas as often.
• dzogchen 10mo ago
  > Anyone who’s fought with CMake or dealt with header file dependencies knows this pain. For a small team trying to move quickly, we didn’t want to waste time debugging build configuration issues. I find this take a bit hard to believe. There's no way that Zig is some kind of magic bullet that avoids build configuration challenges. Especially not considering you are building a browser on top of V8 in a different programming language. CMake is quite crufty, but there's toolchains for every system under the Sun and this is what makes it actually less painful in a lot of cases. Glossing over your build files it does not look particularly scalable or portable. Nice that Zig allows you to write build config in Zig though.
  • torginus 10mo ago
    I think CMake is cool when it works, but debugging it when it doesn't is hell. I've often spent an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out why doesn't it pick up library paths. And although I know Microsoft is uncool, I still want to shill vckpkg as it seems they finally managed to create a usable cross platform package manager for C++
• sorcercode 10mo ago
  I wrote an article (this morning actually!) on picking up Rust to combat AI brain atrophy. My background is JVM-based (Kotlin), and my main contenders were Go vs Rust vs Zig. My reasoning for settling on Rust: If I wanted something more general-purpose and ergonomic, I'd stick with something like Kotlin, which has wider ecosystem support. Go could fit here too, but I've heard from more experienced folks that Go's simplicity can get limiting as codebases grow (and requires 100s of developers to be disciplined). Not impossible, just not as conducive. But since I specifically wanted a performant systems language, I figured I'd go to the other extreme. So my choice was Rust or Zig. I eventually chose Rust (as complicated as Rust can seem) the borrow checker is pretty elegant once it clicks and provides the necessary safety net for a language I intentionally am choosing for more control. (here's my article on learning Rust if folks are interested: https://kau.sh/blog/learn-rust-ai-atrophy/ https://kau.sh/blog/learn-rust-ai-atrophy/) - different angle from the linked article.
• WalterBright 10mo ago
  > Zig particularly shines: comptime metaprogramming, explicit memory allocators, and best-in-class C interoperability. Not to mention the ongoing work on compilation times The D programming language shines: comptime: https://dlang.org/spec/function.html#interpretation https://dlang.org/spec/function.html#interpretation metaprogramming: https://dlang.org/spec/template.html#function-templates https://dlang.org/spec/template.html#function-templates explicit memory allocators: these are easily made, there's nothing special about them, I use them all the time best-in-class C interoperability: Nothing beats D's ImportC, where you can import a .c file as if it were a module. You can even use ImportC to translate your C code to D! https://dlang.org/spec/importc.html https://dlang.org/spec/importc.html Performance: same as C and C++
  • Fire-Dragon-DoL 10mo ago
    Why D sees low adoption?
    • WalterBright 10mo ago
      We could do a better job at marketing
      • PedroBatista 10mo ago
        Build the “killer app” that the audience wants and needs and where D is the best lang to do it and justify the investment in learning yet another lang. I have no idea of what that is and nobody knows, it’s the universal problem of any product/lang/tech. Right place at the right time I guess
        • WalterBright 10mo ago
          A killer app can be built in any language.
          • PedroBatista 10mo ago
• Sytten 10mo ago
  Gotta admit there is something funny about a browser company saying Rust is not well suited for browser development given why it was created in the first place
• aorth 10mo ago
  Sounds fast. Does it respect `robots.txt`? My web services are not written in Rust, Zig, or Go. :)