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> but the fascinating part is its use of partial evaluation (comptime) as a single coherent mechanism that replaces a myriad of other partial-evaluation mechani

> but the fascinating part is its use of partial evaluation (comptime) as a single coherent mechanism that replaces a myriad of other partial-evaluation mechanisms (macros, templates/generics, constexprs). That one mechanism is the core of the language, like macros are in lisps, and that design - whether you like it or not - is revolutionary. That IS cool. I loved partial evaluation the first time I heard of it - Futamura projections, here we come! And if it can be used to obsolete language features I never was happy with (macros), so much better! But until now, I never heard of it as a selling point for Zig. I assumed Zig was just yet another "C replacement but we don't want to deal with Rust's borrow checker". I will certainly have to take a closer look on Zig now. But this should be up and front in their self-promotion!

pron 6d ago
> But this should be up and front in their self-promotion! It is! "A fresh approach to metaprogramming based on compile-time code execution and lazy evaluation" is the second selling point after simplicity: https://ziglang.org https://ziglang.org Obviously, they can't call it partial evaluation because not many people know what that is. Zig's approach was eye opening to me. I'm very familiar with how macros are used in Scheme, but comptime is intentionally weaker (unlike macros, it's referentially transparent, so strictly weaker) and I was surprised by just how far it can go. It's not everyday that you see a new kind of a partial evaluation construct, let alone a language that's almost entirely based on it (like Lisp only for comptime).