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ljm 4 days ago

I didn’t know it was written in Zig. That’s a fascinating choice to me given how young the language is.

Amazing to see it being used in a practical way in production.

robinhood 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Zig was created in 2016 though - almost 10 years at this point. Perhaps the surprise here is that we are not as exposed to this language on well-known and established projects as other languages like Rust, Go and C.

pdpi 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Zig is still at the 0.x stage, and there's still a bunch of churn going on on really basic stuff like IO and memory allocation. I really enjoy writing it, but it's by no means stable to the point many people would write production software in it.

dwattttt 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Rust hit 1.0 in 2015, it started as a project by Graydon Hoare in 2006; those dates line up pretty well with Zig's timeline.

ivanjermakov 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

To be fair, Zig 10 years ago is drastically different language from Zig today.

ojosilva 4 days ago | parent [-]

Which is unfortunately a problem for AI trained on Zig, it makes some AI-assisted Zig coding more challenging, like Q&A and code-completion. It's sad that this glass-ceiling has been enacted for new languages and frameworks, not a deal-breaker at all, just that suddenly there's this penalty on time-to-deliver on anything Zig. But then... the same issue exists when hiring good programmers for lesser-known tech.

There'll probably be a strategy (AEO?) for this in the future for newcomers and the underrepresented, like endless examples posted by a sane AI to their docs and github for instance so it gets picked up by training sets or live, tool calling, web-searches.

rererereferred 3 days ago | parent [-]

Yes, I wouldn't train AI on Zig code just yet. But here's a radical idea, rename the language the moment it hits 1.0: all documentation, blog posts, discussions, SO answers and LLMs for older versions gets automatically voided.

For future languages, maybe it's better to already have a dev name and a release name from the get go.

epolanski 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

The language is very in development but it's ecosystem and tooling are absolutely mature.

ivanjermakov 4 days ago | parent [-]

I would not say that ecosystem is mature. Outside of superb C interop and popular C/C++ lib wrappers.

epolanski 3 days ago | parent [-]

What would you say that the ecosystem lacks that C has?

ivanjermakov 3 days ago | parent [-]

Various native Zig libraries. While C interop is great, converting between C types and calling convention is rather not convenient.