What's it been like managing a fairly large project with Zig? I know you've spoken highly of the language in the past, but recently it seems like Zig has been through some substantial changes that would be relevant to a terminal emulator. I'm curious how painful the churn has been for project maintainers.

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mitchellh an hour ago | parent [-]

It's been extremely good. I should really blog about it in more detail because I do get asked this question regularly. It's been very good.

The large language changes are a burden, but it's something I knew going into it. And so far in every case, it's been well worth it. For example, 0.15 introduced the std.Io.Writer overhaul, but I really love the new API. I haven't started the std.Io change yet for 0.16. We'll see. And honestly, LLMs make this all way less painful... even though they're not trained on it, agents are able to run builds, reference docs, and work their way through the upgrade with huge success.

I thought that finding contributors would be an issue, but it hasn't at all. There's a lot of people out there eager to use Zig, the language isn't hard to learn (as long as you're already familiar with systems concepts), etc. It has been good.

I'll think about more to say if I write about this more but overall, I'm very happy with the language, the community, and the leadership. All good.

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scuff3d 24 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

That's super interesting to hear. I see people say all the time "oh I would never use it in a big project because it's changing so fast", but then see awesome projects like Ghostty and Tiger Beatle written in it, so clearly they're doing something right.

I'm surprised to hear LLMs have been helpful. What little I tried to use them for with Zig, all the information was way too out of date. But I was mainly just doing research, not running an agent at the time, so that's probably why.

	▲	mitchellh 13 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, LLMs with Zig are absolutely useless without agentic behaviors. Throw an agent in the mix and it's totally fine. Bonus points if you pair it with some basic agent skills so it knows how to look up language references, stdlib files, etc. then it does even better.

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novok 9 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Do you get frustrated in using a low training data language like zig with AI models? I've noticed that models tend to be better with languages like TypeScript than Swift because of issues like that.