I really love Zig the language, but I'm distancing myself from the stdlib. I dislike the breakage, but I also started questioning the quality of the code recently. I was working on an alternative I/O framework for Zig over the last months, and I was finding many problems that eventually led to me trying to not depend on stdlib at all.

IME Zig's breaking changes are quite manageable for a lot of application types since most of the breakage these days happens in the stdlib and not in the language. And if you just want do read and write files, the highlevel file-io interfaces are nearly identical, they just moved to a different namespace and now require a std.Io pointer to be passed in.

And tbh, I take a 'living' language any day over a language that's ossified because of strict backward compatibility requirements. When updating a 3rd-party dependency to a new major version it's also expected that the code needs to be fixed (except in Zig those breaking changes are in the minor versions, but for 0.x that's also expected).

I actually hope that even after 1.x, Zig will have a strategy to keep the stdlib lean by aggressively removing deprecated interfaces (maybe via separate stdlib interface versions, e.g. `const std = @import("std/v1");`, those versions could be slim compatibility wrappers around a single core stdlib implementation.

> but for the Grand Majority of the devs in here, it's like an announcement that it's raining in Kuldîga...

Lol, I’ll borrow this.

For what it's worth, Bun is written in Zig (https://bun.sh/). The language isn't exactly in an early stage.

An AI will be able to handle updating your code for 95% of your breaking changes

I wouldn't have expected graphic sex slang to be acceptable as a NH user name.

This would translate as ~"eats pussy", where "broûter" is a verb reserved for animals feeding on grass, implying a hefty bush.

Pretty typical jaded HN comment there, chief. "This language's churn is more than I prefer -- why would anyone use it?" If you're not interested, just downvote and move on. Wondering out loud why anyone would actively use it ("for some reasons?") is a lame waste of bytes.

They aknowlege that at the beggining of the post?

> They are now available to tinker with, by constructing one’s application using std.Io.Evented. They should be considered experimental because there is important followup work to be done before they can be used reliably and robustly:

And then they proceed to list 6 important pending work to be done.

That won't happen if there are legitimate reasons why both Mitchell Hashimoto (creator of Ghostty etc.) and Richard Feldman (of Elm fame, creator of Roc-lang) chose Zig over Rust for their work. They both blogged about it

https://tomas-svojanovsky.medium.com/mitchell-hashimoto-go-a...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJ5-41u-e7k

https://weeklyrust.substack.com/p/why-roc-is-moving-away-fro...

Perhaps there is room for both... via C FFI interop, of course, lol

(C FFI will probably long outlast C itself...)

I think Rust and Zig really don't overlap much when it comes to target audience. E.g. if you're attracted to Rust, you'll probably find Zig terrible (and the other way around).

Rust will also never replace C or C++ in any meaningful way, at best new code gets written in new languages (and Rust being only one among many, and among languages used for new projects will also be C and C++, just maybe not that often).

I think the era of 'pop star languages' is over, the programming language future is highly diverse (and that's a good thing).

The more compelling scenario is one where the unsafe subset of Rust itself becomes roughly as easy to use as Zig is today, though still with potential challenges wrt. properly interacting with safe code.

That requires literally rethinking every language and standard library facility and asking "is this putting up artificial roadblocks or even invoking straight UB when one tries to use it idiomatically in unsafe contexts?", then coming up with more flexible, more "C like" facilities in that case. It's hard work but quite doable.

> the worry is by the time it reaches v1 Rust will have consumed the space that C/C++ used to

Given that Rust is quite an old language now and its adoption is still so low, I don't think that should be much of a worry, although that doesn't mean Zig will be the option of choice, and not stabilising is certainly not a good sign. At Rust's adoption rate, a language that hasn't been invented yet and that would show a more normal rate of adoption for a popular language could easily overtake it.

> There is also the issue of will people actually code by then.

Now that could be a bigger issue. :)

I don't think Rust is "a better C/C++". It's a new kind of beast. Interesting, but very different.

Zig OTOH is clearly, to me at least (opinion alert), a "better C". It even compiles C!

I expect LLMs to be really good at converting C to Zig.

> There is also the issue of will people actually code by then.

LLMs don't take responsibility. So even if code is generated, a human will have to assess it. I think assessing Zig is easier than assessing C, which gives this language a selling point that holds out in the AI assisted programming future.

I wouldn’t worry about that. There’s plenty of software yet to be written, in many languages. If anything, Rust’s success has shown that it’s definitely possible for a new language to succeed if it offers something new.

The other tailwind for Zig is that it’s easier than ever to translate an existing codebase with tests into a new language with AI.

It’s surprising to me how much people seem to want async in low level languages. Async is very nice in Go, but the reason I reach for a language like Zig is to explicitly control those things. I’m happily writing a Zig project right now using libxev as my io_uring abstraction.