There is nothing new under the Sun. However, some languages manifest as good rewrites of older languages. Rust is that for C++. Zig is that for C.

Rust is the small, beautiful language hiding inside of Modern C++. Ownership isn't new. It's the core tenet of RAII. Rust just pulls it out of the backwards-compatible kitchen sink and builds it into the type system. Rust is worth learning just so that you can fully experience that lens of software development.

Zig is Modern C development encapsulated in a new language. Most importantly, it dodges Rust and C++'s biggest mistake, not passing allocators into containers and functions. All realtime development has to rewrite their entire standard libraries, like with the EASTL.

On top of the great standard library design, you get comptime, native build scripts, (err)defer, error sets, builtin simd, and tons of other small but important ideas. It's just a really good language that knows exactly what it is and who its audience is.

Much of the book's copy appears to have been written by AI (despite the foreword statement that none of it was), which explains the hokey overenthusiasm and exaggerations.

For those who actually want to learn languages which are "fundamentally changing how you think about software", I'd recommend the Lisp family and APL family.

> It is about fundamentally changing how you think about software.

> I'm not sure what they expect, but to me Zig looks very much like C

Yes. I think people should sincerely stop with this kind of wording.

That makes Zig looks like some kind of cult.

Technically speaking, Zig democratized the concept of imperative compile time meta-programming (which is an excellent thing).

For everything else, this is mainly reuse and cherry pick from other languages.

I guess comptime is a little different but yeah I wouldn't say it fundamentally changes how you think about software.

I wouldn't say that about OCaml either really though. It's not wildly different in the way that e.g. Lean's type system, or Rust's borrow checker or Haskell's purity is.

Zig community really tries to match Rust one in terms of cult resemblance.

Because site site explicitly says:

> The Zigbook intentionally contains no AI-generated content—it is hand-written, carefully curated, and continuously updated to reflect the latest language features and best practices.

If the site would have said something like "We use AI to clean up our prose, but it was all audited thoroughly by a human after", I wouldn't have an issue. Even better if they shared their prompts.

> Why does it matter?

Because AI gets things wrong, often, in ways that can be very difficult to catch. By their very nature LLMs write text that sounds plausible enough to bypass manual review (see https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2025/07/14/death-by-a-thousand-s...), so some find it best to avoid using it at all when writing documentation.

Because the first thing you see when you click the link is "Zero AI" pasted under the most obviously AI-generated copy I've ever seen. It's just an insult to our intelligence, obviously we're gonna call OP out on this. Why lie like that?

It matters because, it irritates me to no end that I have to review AI generated content that a human did not verify before. I don't like being made to work in the guise of someone giving me free content.

> That’s like saying you used a calculator to calculate your equations so I can’t trust you.

A calculator exists solely for the realm of mathematics, where you can afford to more or less throw away the value of human input and overall craftsmanship.

That is not the case with something like this, which - while it leans in to engineering - is in effect viewed as a work of art by people who give a shit about the actual craft of writing software.

> Why does it matter?

I am just a human supremacist.

If you believed that you wouldn't explicitly say there was no AI generated content at all, you'd let it speak for itself.

>That’s like saying you used a calculator to calculate your equations so I can’t trust you.

No it isn't. My TI-83 is deterministic and will give me exactly what I ask for, and will always do so, and when someone uses it they need to understand the math first or otherwise the calculator is useless.

These AI models on the other hand don't care about correctness, by design don't give you deterministic answers, and the person asking the question might as well be a monkey as far as their own understanding of the subject matter goes. These models are if anything an anti-calculator.

As Dijkstra points out in his fantastic essay on the idiocy of natural language "computation", what you are doing is exactly not computation but a kind of medieval incantation. Computers were designed to render impossible precisely the nonsense that LLMs produce. The biggest idiot on earth will still get a correct result from the calculator because unlike the LLM it is based on boolean logic, not verbal or pictorial garbage.

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667...

An awful lot of commenters are convinced that it's AI-generated, despite explicit statements to the contrary. Maybe they're wrong, maybe they're right, but none of them currently have any proof stronger than vibes. It's like everyone has gaslit themselves into thinking that humans can't write well-structured neutral-tone docs any more.

I value human work and I do NOT value work that has been done with heavy AI usage. Most AI things I've seen are slop, I instantly recognize AI songs for example. I just dont want anything to do with it. The uniqueness of creative work is lost with using AI.

Insecurity, that's why.

I too have this feeling sometimes. It's a coping mechanism. I don't know why we have this but I guess we have to see past it and adapt to reality.

I'd add Prolog to that list; but Fortran and Perl aren't all that different from other procedural languages.

I agree, I love zig but the things that make me program differently are features like excellent enum/union support, defer and comptime, which aren't readily available in the other languages I tend to use (C++, Fortran and Python).

I would rephrase it as, Zig is just Modula-2 with a C like syntax.

I suspect most developers do not know C.

That tagline unfortunately turned me off the book, without even starting to read.

I really don't need this kind of self-enlightenment rubbish.

What if I read the whole book and felt no change?

I think I understand SoA just fine.

If there is a PDF version, please remember to give me one. Thank you in advance.

> It's really hard to believe this isn't AI generated

Case of a person who is relying on LLMs so much he cannot imagine doing something big by themselves.

I've had the same experience as you with Zig. I quite love the idea of it Zig but the undocumented churn is a bit much. I wish they had auto generated docs that reflect the current state of the stdlib, at least. Even if it just listed the signatures with no commentary.

I was trying to solve a simple problem but Google, the official docs, and LLMs were all out of date. I eventually found what I needed in Zig's commit history, where they casually renamed something without updating the docs. It's been renamed once more apparently, still not reflected in the docs :shrugs:.

That statement is honestly self-contradictory. If a draft was AI-generated and then reviewed, edited, and owned by a human contributor, then the parts which survived reviewing and editing verbatim were still AI-generated...

Nah, just a lot of prompting.

Every time I read things like this, it makes me think that AI was trained off of me. Using semicolons, utilizing classic writing patterns, and common use of compare and contrast are all examples of how they teach to write essays in high school and college. They're also all examples of how I think and have learned to communicate.

I'm not sure what to make of that either.

I mean maybe the content is not AI generated (I wouldn’t say it is) but the website does have an AI generated smell to it. From the colors to the shapes, it looks like Sonnet or Opus definitely made some tweaks.

Clearly your perception of what is AI generated is wrong. You can't tell something is AI generated only because it uses "not just X - Y" constructions. I mean, the reason AI text often uses it is because it's common in the training material. So of course you're going to see it everywhere.

Pretty clear it's all AI. The @zigbook account only has 1 activity prior to publishing this repo, and that's an issue where they mention "ai has made me too lazy": https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/272725

It's just an odd claim to make when it feels very much like AI generated content + publish the text anonymously. It's obviously possible to write like this without AI, but I can't remember reading something like this that wasn't written by AI.

It doesn't take away from the fact that someone used a bunch of time and effort on this project.

I was pretty skeptical too, but it looks legit to me. I've been doing Zig off and on for several years, and have read through the things I feel like I have a good understanding of (though I'm not working on the compiler, contributing to the language, etc.) and they are explained correctly in a logical/thoughtful way. I also work with LLMs a ton at work, and you'd have to spoon-feed the model to get outputs this cohesive.

Pangram[1] flags the introduction as totally AI-written, which I also suspected for the same reasons you did

[1] one of the only AI detectors that actually works, 99.9% accuracy, 0.1% false positive

Doesn't mean that the author might not use AI to optimise legibility. You can write stuff yourself and use an LLM to enhance the reading flow. Especially for non-native speakers it is immensely helpful to do so. Doesn't mean that the content is "AI-generated". The essence is still written by a human.

> Can the author... Convince me otherwise?

Not disagreeing with you, but out of interest, how could you be convinced otherwise?

The sweet irony of this post is that this very post itself is written by an LLM.

I wish AI had the self-built irony of adding vomit emojis to their sycophantic sentences.

I don't think so, I think it's just a pompous style of writing.

You can't just say that a linguistic style "proves" or even "suggests" AI. Remember, AI is just spitting out things its seen before elsewhere. There's plenty of other texts I've seen with this sort of writing style, written long before AI was around.

Can I also ask: so what if it is or it isn't?

While AI slop is infuriating, and the bubble hype is maddening, I'm not sure every time somebody sees some content they don't like the style of we just call out it "must" be AI, and debate if it is or it isn't is not at least as maddening. It feels like all content published now gets debated like this, and I'm definitely not enjoying it.

IMO HN should add a guideline about not insinuating things were written by AI. It degrades the quality of the site similarly to many of the existing rules.

Arguably it would be covered by some of the existing rules, but it's become such a common occurrence that it may need singling out.

Who cares?

Still better than just nagging.

Hmmm what about this: https://ziglang.org/learn/why_zig_rust_d_cpp/

Convincing enough?

I found it, maybe it was there all along. Go to chapters, then open the side menu with the hamburger button.

https://github.com/zigbook/zigbook/tree/main/pages

There is also Brainmade: https://brainmade.org/

There seems to be https://notbyai.fyi/ and https://no-ai-icon.com/ ..!

I like these ones:

https://cadence.moe/blog/2024-10-05-created-by-a-human-badge...

Even for content that isn’t directly composed by llm, I bet there’d be value in an alerting system that could ingest your docs and code+commits and flag places where behaviour referenced by docs has changed and may need to be updated.

This kind of “workflow” llm use has the potential to deliver a lot of value even to a scenario where the final product is human-composed.

> Most programming languages hide complexity from you—they abstract away memory management, mask control flow with implicit operations, and shield you from the machine beneath. This feels simple at first, but eventually you hit a wall. You need to understand why something is slow, where a crash happened, or how to squeeze every ounce of performance from your hardware. Suddenly, the abstractions that helped you get started are now in your way.

> Zig takes a different path. It reveals complexity—and then gives you the tools to master it.

> This book will take you from Hello, world! to building systems that cross-compile to any platform, manage memory with surgical precision, and generate code at compile time. You will learn not just how Zig works, but why it works the way it does. Every allocation will be explicit. Every control path will be visible. Every abstraction will be precise, not vague.

But sadly people like the prompter of this book will lie and pretend to have written things themselves that they did not. First three paragraphs by the way, and a bingo for every sign of AI.

Meh. I mean, who's it for? People should be adopting the stance that everything is AI on the internet and make decisions from there. If you start trusting people telling you that they're not using AI, you're setting yourself up to be conned.

Edit: So I wrote this before I read the rest of the thread where everyone is pointing out this is indeed probably AI, so right of the bat the "AI-free" label is conning people.

It's AI-written FWIW

though maybe AI is getting to the point it can do stuff like this somewhat decently

SAME. I was looking for a donation button myself! I've paid for worse quality instructional material. this is just the sort of thing I'm happy to support

How do you feel about regular books, whose iterations and edits you dont see?

Do you have any criticism of the content, or just "I don't know the author"?