4 ms·

I am impartial on the matter, but I think one of the reasons Bun became a thing in the first place was because of Zig attracted a small but very active develope

by _pdp_ 3mo ago

I am impartial on the matter, but I think one of the reasons Bun became a thing in the first place was because of Zig attracted a small but very active developer community. Switching from Zig to Rust effectively alienates that community.

petcat 3mo ago
I think the Zig people are really just worried that maybe Zig itself is a DOA language before it has even reached 1.0 because it doesn't offer enough over C for any serious use and their flagship project has now abandoned it.
- pmarreck 3mo ago
  Anyone actually using it knows it is better. The C interop is so good that there is no use-case where C is the better option IMHO
  - 59nadir 3mo ago
    You, by your own admission, haven't even written a single line of Zig despite having ~31 Zig projects on GitHub. I don't think your knowledge of the language is to be trusted in almost any capacity. This might seem harsh but I don't trust someone who's experience with a language amounts to slopping out 30+ repositories and not even engaging with the language normally.
    - lstodd 3mo ago
      By my own admission I wrote ~100K loc in zig-head. Having a background in linux kernel development of all things I can tell you that Zig is so much better than C or Rust, that I think linux kernel rush to rust is misguided.
      - 59nadir 3mo ago
        I haven't even stated whether I agree with the opinion that Zig is worth it, in fact I do think Zig is worth it for a large set of problems and I wrote Zig for years, I am stating simply that I would never trust anyone who's self-admitting that they don't even write the language they're arguing for when it comes to opinions on whether it's good or not. It's not really about whether Zig is good, it's about someone who doesn't even write the language and doesn't even know it, not having a valuable opinion on it.
      - pmarreck 3mo ago
        Same. In fact I think going to Zig, possibly on the way to Rust, would have been a far more pragmatic route. But I guess my opinion is null and void since I "slop-code"
    - pmarreck 3mo ago
      I guess that since you haven't built the car you're driving, your opinions on it are null and void as well. Anyone who actually believes that I can't have ANY sound opinion on Zig after 31 projects building with it should get their head examined for brain tumors. I mean, it's not like I have to deal with all the positive and negative effects of things written in it. It's not like I've had to solve problems in it that emerged when the LLM didn't do things correctly (and yes, I can tell when this is so, and not just when things are buggy). And it's not like I don't know (by heart, not by LLM) at least 15 other languages that I can draw on (C, for example, for which I not only got an A in a class at Cornell once, but was in fact the person with the highest score in a class of ~150 people... A perfect score, in fact) to form valid opinions in combination with how I see Zig working. So please take your baseless skepticism and baseless assumptions and shove them up your ass, dude. I have work to do, and I'm far more capable of it now than I was, thanks to the LLM boost.
      - 59nadir 3mo ago
        Honestly, I wasn't harsh enough... Though I don't think I could write a better post showing how useless your opinion on things actually is than the one you wrote yourself. And no, I don't think you can have any valuable opinions on Zig since you don't write it. In your analogy you're not even driving the car, but it doesn't surprise me that you can't figure that out.
        pmarreck 3mo ago
        I am absolutely plotting the route and intervening when the car tries to do something stupid. That ends up working out a lot better than actually driving the car because you can focus on the goals, the car often knows better routes that you failed to consider, you can measure the tradeoffs and you can determine the minimum-viable-path to get there, so just fuck right the hell off with this stupid-ass baseless skepticism the ones learning how to run the looms safely and productively are going to continue to succeed and scale upwards and outwards while you get paid pennies to use knitting needles on bespoke hand-coded solutions. And at this point, I don't give a damn anymore because you lot deserve your upcoming rot 1000%, especially with a stubborn pissant plebe fucking answer like that. Holy shit. You're literally going to stubborn yourself into poverty just to make a point. Enjoy.
  - pjmlp 3mo ago
    Industry standards, existing team knowledge, use after free story is the same as C already has.
- bitwize 3mo ago
  Zig is a DOA language for other reasons though. The reason why Rust enthusiasts act so morally superior is because they are: > Rob Pike, an unsafe guy, may insist that a small language and garbage collection are enough. But the typesafe visionary Grzegorz Wielbodłąński understands the deeper truth: every invalid state permitted by a compiler is a tiny act of civilizational sabotage. https://x.com/typememetics/status/2078572052680790237 https://x.com/typememetics/status/2078572052680790237 There is no sense pretending anymore that languages with as many gotchas as C and Zig are "simple". Quite simply, they are not. The complexities lie in what's left unspoken, unaddressed, and of course undefined; failure to comprehend these completely can be catastrophic. Rust is so thoroughly and obviously the correct thing that using anything less correct should be taken as a sign of engineering incompetence.
  - K0nserv 3mo ago
    > There is no sense pretending anymore that languages with as many gotchas as C and Zig are "simple". Quite simply, they are not. The complexities lie in what's left unspoken, unaddressed, and of course undefined; failure to comprehend these completely can be catastrophic. This is where I’ve arrived too. After nearly 20 years of programming I feel done with leaving foot guns lying around. Languages that are full of them, but “fine” as long as you take extreme care are not interesting to me. I’ve started calling this “simple as long as you avoid all the foot guns” idea the sword juggling fallacy[0]. It’s too bad about Zig because it has many nice ideas, in particular allocators, that I hope Rust or some future language will adopt. 0: https://hugotunius.se/2026/06/15/the-sword-juggling-fallacy.html https://hugotunius.se/2026/06/15/the-sword-juggling-fallacy....
    - skydhash 3mo ago
      There are many things in life that are "fine" only when you take extreme care (knives, cars, industrial machinery,...). The thing is something like C has many usages and you can't just say "use Rust" and be done with it. Using Rust is not cost-free.
      - K0nserv 3mo ago
- casey2 3mo ago
  Bun was the flagship product of zig? In reality or in YC land
phoghed 3mo ago
If this were true the very small but active community of Zig contributors could just fork it and you could all return to the happy times of not using Bun anyway.
CrimsonRain 3mo ago
Bun became a thing because it provided some specific benefit to js ecosystem. Zig enabled the rapid development. The people who contributed were definitely helpful but they can still choose to help or not and new people will step up too
- LtWorf 3mo ago
  > new people will step up too Or they will not… how could you possibly know.

by _pdp_ 3mo ago

petcat 3mo ago

I think the Zig people are really just worried that maybe Zig itself is a DOA language before it has even reached 1.0 because it doesn't offer enough over C for any serious use and their flagship project has now abandoned it.

pmarreck 3mo ago
Anyone actually using it knows it is better. The C interop is so good that there is no use-case where C is the better option IMHO
- 59nadir 3mo ago
  You, by your own admission, haven't even written a single line of Zig despite having ~31 Zig projects on GitHub. I don't think your knowledge of the language is to be trusted in almost any capacity. This might seem harsh but I don't trust someone who's experience with a language amounts to slopping out 30+ repositories and not even engaging with the language normally.
  - lstodd 3mo ago
    By my own admission I wrote ~100K loc in zig-head. Having a background in linux kernel development of all things I can tell you that Zig is so much better than C or Rust, that I think linux kernel rush to rust is misguided.
    - 59nadir 3mo ago
      I haven't even stated whether I agree with the opinion that Zig is worth it, in fact I do think Zig is worth it for a large set of problems and I wrote Zig for years, I am stating simply that I would never trust anyone who's self-admitting that they don't even write the language they're arguing for when it comes to opinions on whether it's good or not. It's not really about whether Zig is good, it's about someone who doesn't even write the language and doesn't even know it, not having a valuable opinion on it.
    - pmarreck 3mo ago
      Same. In fact I think going to Zig, possibly on the way to Rust, would have been a far more pragmatic route. But I guess my opinion is null and void since I "slop-code"
  - pmarreck 3mo ago
    I guess that since you haven't built the car you're driving, your opinions on it are null and void as well. Anyone who actually believes that I can't have ANY sound opinion on Zig after 31 projects building with it should get their head examined for brain tumors. I mean, it's not like I have to deal with all the positive and negative effects of things written in it. It's not like I've had to solve problems in it that emerged when the LLM didn't do things correctly (and yes, I can tell when this is so, and not just when things are buggy). And it's not like I don't know (by heart, not by LLM) at least 15 other languages that I can draw on (C, for example, for which I not only got an A in a class at Cornell once, but was in fact the person with the highest score in a class of ~150 people... A perfect score, in fact) to form valid opinions in combination with how I see Zig working. So please take your baseless skepticism and baseless assumptions and shove them up your ass, dude. I have work to do, and I'm far more capable of it now than I was, thanks to the LLM boost.
    - 59nadir 3mo ago
      Honestly, I wasn't harsh enough... Though I don't think I could write a better post showing how useless your opinion on things actually is than the one you wrote yourself. And no, I don't think you can have any valuable opinions on Zig since you don't write it. In your analogy you're not even driving the car, but it doesn't surprise me that you can't figure that out.
      - pmarreck 3mo ago
        I am absolutely plotting the route and intervening when the car tries to do something stupid. That ends up working out a lot better than actually driving the car because you can focus on the goals, the car often knows better routes that you failed to consider, you can measure the tradeoffs and you can determine the minimum-viable-path to get there, so just fuck right the hell off with this stupid-ass baseless skepticism the ones learning how to run the looms safely and productively are going to continue to succeed and scale upwards and outwards while you get paid pennies to use knitting needles on bespoke hand-coded solutions. And at this point, I don't give a damn anymore because you lot deserve your upcoming rot 1000%, especially with a stubborn pissant plebe fucking answer like that. Holy shit. You're literally going to stubborn yourself into poverty just to make a point. Enjoy.
- pjmlp 3mo ago
  Industry standards, existing team knowledge, use after free story is the same as C already has.
bitwize 3mo ago
Zig is a DOA language for other reasons though. The reason why Rust enthusiasts act so morally superior is because they are: > Rob Pike, an unsafe guy, may insist that a small language and garbage collection are enough. But the typesafe visionary Grzegorz Wielbodłąński understands the deeper truth: every invalid state permitted by a compiler is a tiny act of civilizational sabotage. https://x.com/typememetics/status/2078572052680790237 https://x.com/typememetics/status/2078572052680790237 There is no sense pretending anymore that languages with as many gotchas as C and Zig are "simple". Quite simply, they are not. The complexities lie in what's left unspoken, unaddressed, and of course undefined; failure to comprehend these completely can be catastrophic. Rust is so thoroughly and obviously the correct thing that using anything less correct should be taken as a sign of engineering incompetence.
- K0nserv 3mo ago
  > There is no sense pretending anymore that languages with as many gotchas as C and Zig are "simple". Quite simply, they are not. The complexities lie in what's left unspoken, unaddressed, and of course undefined; failure to comprehend these completely can be catastrophic. This is where I’ve arrived too. After nearly 20 years of programming I feel done with leaving foot guns lying around. Languages that are full of them, but “fine” as long as you take extreme care are not interesting to me. I’ve started calling this “simple as long as you avoid all the foot guns” idea the sword juggling fallacy[0]. It’s too bad about Zig because it has many nice ideas, in particular allocators, that I hope Rust or some future language will adopt. 0: https://hugotunius.se/2026/06/15/the-sword-juggling-fallacy.html https://hugotunius.se/2026/06/15/the-sword-juggling-fallacy....
  - skydhash 3mo ago
    There are many things in life that are "fine" only when you take extreme care (knives, cars, industrial machinery,...). The thing is something like C has many usages and you can't just say "use Rust" and be done with it. Using Rust is not cost-free.
    - K0nserv 3mo ago
casey2 3mo ago
Bun was the flagship product of zig? In reality or in YC land

phoghed 3mo ago

If this were true the very small but active community of Zig contributors could just fork it and you could all return to the happy times of not using Bun anyway.

CrimsonRain 3mo ago

Bun became a thing because it provided some specific benefit to js ecosystem. Zig enabled the rapid development. The people who contributed were definitely helpful but they can still choose to help or not and new people will step up too

LtWorf 3mo ago
> new people will step up too Or they will not… how could you possibly know.