6 ms·

What does this mean for Zig? Few big popular projects use Zig, if they start to move away from it, what Zig's future will look like?

by akagusu 5mo ago

jadbox 5mo ago
Jarred has already said on Twitter that this was only an experiment for comparisons and very, very unlikely that they'd switch to Rust.
- __s 5mo ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48077663 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48077663
SwellJoe 5mo ago
It means nothing for Zig. Zig isn't even out of beta yet.
NewsaHackO 5mo ago
I think the issue is that Zig lost their biggest project, which was a posterboy project for real uses of Zig. Worse, the project felt like Zig wasn't meeting their needs, to the point they abandoned Zig and rewrote their entire project in a different language. Really bad signal for anyone thinking of using Zig for a big project. It is still in beta, but has there been any situation like this, where a upcoming programming language was abandoned by its biggest external project and still was able to be considered a successful language after that?
- toshinoriyagi 5mo ago
  Well they haven't lost anything yet. Somebody is vibe coding a rewrite in another language and we don't know much else. The author said he will write a blog post about it soon. So far all we know is it is passing most of the test suite. But Bun has open issues and bugs. The test suite doesn't tell us whether it has introduced many new bugs, solved existing ones the test suite doesn't catch, or anything else. Not to mention, the rewrite is 960K lines that nobody understands. How long will it take for the Rust version to be better, and be understood as well as its current maintainers understand the Zig version? Having a project consider a rewrite isn't so big a deal. Zig has been designed from the ground up with a vision, and isn't worried about taking a while to create a stable API to achieve that vision. The self-hosted backend shows how incredibly fast incremental compilation is when the language is built for it ground-up. Compared to other languages that implement weaker forms of incremental compilation it isn't even close. I don't think the Zig team is concerned at all.
  - NewsaHackO 5mo ago
    >Having a project consider a rewrite isn't so big a deal. I don't agree that them actually doing an entire draft rewrite can just be characterized as them considering a rewrite. >I don't think the Zig team is concerned at all. I wonder if that's the mentality that got them in this situation in the first place.
    - toshinoriyagi 5mo ago
      >I don't agree that them actually doing an entire draft rewrite can just be characterized as them considering a rewrite. You're right, a rewrite is in existence, and whether it is good enough to be used or expand upon is what is being considered. I don't think that changes the fact that languages don't live or die by whether or not 1 large project using them continues using them. Especially a language like Zig which has taken plenty time making breaking changes. They know this is par for the course. >I wonder if that's the mentality that got them in this situation in the first place. I highly doubt it. To my knowledge, the only "why" Jarred has given is frustration with memory issues. Speculated reasons I see are: 1. Anthropic wants a rewrite to a language with a more favorable AI contribution policy, to avoid bad press by acquiring a framework written in a language that is skeptical of AI code quality. 2. Rust is more stable and a better target for AI-assisted programming or entire vibe coding. 3. Bun is upset Zig does not want to merge their fork into main. Focusing on the issue Jarred gave as why he started the rewrite, I don't see how Zig got themselves into the situation at all. Zig was always upfront that it aimed to be a modern C: simple language, powerful modern features, and excellent compatibility with all things C. While it certainly has much better behavior concerning memory safety and undefined behavior, it has never aimed for Rust or GC level memory safety. It's not like Jarred has been begging the Zig devs to implement language changes to make Bun development easier. Zig was always upfront that you will have to manage memory manually, and that allows for operator error. I think Jarred is in this situation because he wants to be, simply. He works for Anthropic, probably has no limit on how many tokens he spends, and may have access to their most powerful internal models like Mythos. I would guess he pointed agents at this problem and let them go, because why not? He has likely has no opportunity cost.
- andriy_koval 5mo ago
  Is it lost already? Did antropic already say new LLM generated thing is way to go for the future?
- stock_toaster 5mo ago
  > I think the issue is that Zig lost their biggest project, which was a posterboy project for real uses of Zig. Bun, Ghostty, and TigerBeetle are 3 popular projects that I have heard about using zig.
  - NewsaHackO 5mo ago
    So I have barely heard about Ghostty, and not at all about Tigerbeetle. Honestly, even Bun is a 2nd/3rd tier JS engine. Regardless, I think that if Bun goes forward with the port, the biggest issue is that for a language to so not live up to expectations that someone was willing to rewrite a ~1M LOC project to an entirely new language is insane. The most common case when there are some deficiencies in a language stalling development is to rewrite/refactor parts of their code base to another language that they feel as though would be better suited, not completely rewrite everything.
kennykartman 5mo ago
Nobody knows. Here's my two cents. Zig is a very interesting LOW level language, but honestly I think it should be considered for what it is: a better C. I don't think it fits for anything that someone would have written in C++, Java, Haskell or C#. Instead, Rust is competitive with all of these languages when it comes to safety, abstractions and speed. And also C and Zig itself. Zig has a couple very interesting ideas that make it stand out: comptime and the zig build system. Alas, Zig is still far from being stable. Rust came out to the public in 2012 and became stable (1.0) in 2015. Zig came out to the public in 2016, and it's 10 years now and someone says it's still years away from 1.0. So, while rust took 3 years of public development to become stable, zig is taking 10/15 years. I love the language, but TBH I don't see a great future ahead, especially with LLMs advancements that can use safer languages to do the same work. There's no point in risking more memory bugs when the effort for writing code is the same.
smj-edison 5mo ago
Honestly I think, at least to the Zig community, But isn't the biggest name we'd think of. There's been some philosophical friction between the Zig project and Bun (Zig is pretty anti-AI and favor methodical thinking through of problems, while Bun is more move fast and break things). I think TigerBeetle is a better representation of what Zig can do. TigerBeetle is fuzzed within an inch of its life, and is absolutely rock solid. The people who work on it are brilliant programmers who care a lot about correctness. They find that Zig lets them express their ideas succinctly, while still giving them the needed power. When I read about Bun, I get the sense that Jarron has different priorities, mainly moving quickly. Bun also implements a lot of userspace APIs, since the core engine is JavaScriptCore which is written in C++. I think Rust really shines in applications programming, so I guess it makes sense that Rust has lined up with Jarron's needs. I'd be interested to see what JavaScriptCore would look like in Zig versus Rust, I think Zig might have an edge in the core interpreter and JIT.
JCharante 5mo ago
This is like when Aaron ported Reddit over from Lisp to Python meaning it doesn't matter except for online discourse about X being bad for 2 days

What does this mean for Zig? Few big popular projects use Zig, if they start to move away from it, what Zig's future will look like?

by akagusu 5mo ago

What does this mean for Zig? Few big popular projects use Zig, if they start to move away from it, what Zig's future will look like?

jadbox 5mo ago

Jarred has already said on Twitter that this was only an experiment for comparisons and very, very unlikely that they'd switch to Rust.

__s 5mo ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48077663 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48077663

SwellJoe 5mo ago

It means nothing for Zig. Zig isn't even out of beta yet.

NewsaHackO 5mo ago

I think the issue is that Zig lost their biggest project, which was a posterboy project for real uses of Zig. Worse, the project felt like Zig wasn't meeting their needs, to the point they abandoned Zig and rewrote their entire project in a different language. Really bad signal for anyone thinking of using Zig for a big project. It is still in beta, but has there been any situation like this, where a upcoming programming language was abandoned by its biggest external project and still was able to be considered a successful language after that?

toshinoriyagi 5mo ago
Well they haven't lost anything yet. Somebody is vibe coding a rewrite in another language and we don't know much else. The author said he will write a blog post about it soon. So far all we know is it is passing most of the test suite. But Bun has open issues and bugs. The test suite doesn't tell us whether it has introduced many new bugs, solved existing ones the test suite doesn't catch, or anything else. Not to mention, the rewrite is 960K lines that nobody understands. How long will it take for the Rust version to be better, and be understood as well as its current maintainers understand the Zig version? Having a project consider a rewrite isn't so big a deal. Zig has been designed from the ground up with a vision, and isn't worried about taking a while to create a stable API to achieve that vision. The self-hosted backend shows how incredibly fast incremental compilation is when the language is built for it ground-up. Compared to other languages that implement weaker forms of incremental compilation it isn't even close. I don't think the Zig team is concerned at all.
- NewsaHackO 5mo ago
  >Having a project consider a rewrite isn't so big a deal. I don't agree that them actually doing an entire draft rewrite can just be characterized as them considering a rewrite. >I don't think the Zig team is concerned at all. I wonder if that's the mentality that got them in this situation in the first place.
  - toshinoriyagi 5mo ago
    >I don't agree that them actually doing an entire draft rewrite can just be characterized as them considering a rewrite. You're right, a rewrite is in existence, and whether it is good enough to be used or expand upon is what is being considered. I don't think that changes the fact that languages don't live or die by whether or not 1 large project using them continues using them. Especially a language like Zig which has taken plenty time making breaking changes. They know this is par for the course. >I wonder if that's the mentality that got them in this situation in the first place. I highly doubt it. To my knowledge, the only "why" Jarred has given is frustration with memory issues. Speculated reasons I see are: 1. Anthropic wants a rewrite to a language with a more favorable AI contribution policy, to avoid bad press by acquiring a framework written in a language that is skeptical of AI code quality. 2. Rust is more stable and a better target for AI-assisted programming or entire vibe coding. 3. Bun is upset Zig does not want to merge their fork into main. Focusing on the issue Jarred gave as why he started the rewrite, I don't see how Zig got themselves into the situation at all. Zig was always upfront that it aimed to be a modern C: simple language, powerful modern features, and excellent compatibility with all things C. While it certainly has much better behavior concerning memory safety and undefined behavior, it has never aimed for Rust or GC level memory safety. It's not like Jarred has been begging the Zig devs to implement language changes to make Bun development easier. Zig was always upfront that you will have to manage memory manually, and that allows for operator error. I think Jarred is in this situation because he wants to be, simply. He works for Anthropic, probably has no limit on how many tokens he spends, and may have access to their most powerful internal models like Mythos. I would guess he pointed agents at this problem and let them go, because why not? He has likely has no opportunity cost.
andriy_koval 5mo ago
Is it lost already? Did antropic already say new LLM generated thing is way to go for the future?
stock_toaster 5mo ago
> I think the issue is that Zig lost their biggest project, which was a posterboy project for real uses of Zig. Bun, Ghostty, and TigerBeetle are 3 popular projects that I have heard about using zig.
- NewsaHackO 5mo ago
  So I have barely heard about Ghostty, and not at all about Tigerbeetle. Honestly, even Bun is a 2nd/3rd tier JS engine. Regardless, I think that if Bun goes forward with the port, the biggest issue is that for a language to so not live up to expectations that someone was willing to rewrite a ~1M LOC project to an entirely new language is insane. The most common case when there are some deficiencies in a language stalling development is to rewrite/refactor parts of their code base to another language that they feel as though would be better suited, not completely rewrite everything.

kennykartman 5mo ago

Nobody knows. Here's my two cents. Zig is a very interesting LOW level language, but honestly I think it should be considered for what it is: a better C. I don't think it fits for anything that someone would have written in C++, Java, Haskell or C#. Instead, Rust is competitive with all of these languages when it comes to safety, abstractions and speed. And also C and Zig itself. Zig has a couple very interesting ideas that make it stand out: comptime and the zig build system. Alas, Zig is still far from being stable. Rust came out to the public in 2012 and became stable (1.0) in 2015. Zig came out to the public in 2016, and it's 10 years now and someone says it's still years away from 1.0. So, while rust took 3 years of public development to become stable, zig is taking 10/15 years. I love the language, but TBH I don't see a great future ahead, especially with LLMs advancements that can use safer languages to do the same work. There's no point in risking more memory bugs when the effort for writing code is the same.

smj-edison 5mo ago

Honestly I think, at least to the Zig community, But isn't the biggest name we'd think of. There's been some philosophical friction between the Zig project and Bun (Zig is pretty anti-AI and favor methodical thinking through of problems, while Bun is more move fast and break things). I think TigerBeetle is a better representation of what Zig can do. TigerBeetle is fuzzed within an inch of its life, and is absolutely rock solid. The people who work on it are brilliant programmers who care a lot about correctness. They find that Zig lets them express their ideas succinctly, while still giving them the needed power. When I read about Bun, I get the sense that Jarron has different priorities, mainly moving quickly. Bun also implements a lot of userspace APIs, since the core engine is JavaScriptCore which is written in C++. I think Rust really shines in applications programming, so I guess it makes sense that Rust has lined up with Jarron's needs. I'd be interested to see what JavaScriptCore would look like in Zig versus Rust, I think Zig might have an edge in the core interpreter and JIT.

JCharante 5mo ago

This is like when Aaron ported Reddit over from Lisp to Python meaning it doesn't matter except for online discourse about X being bad for 2 days