Zig is a pre-1.0 language while Rust is post-1.0. This alone is settles which one to pick for may developers. The library support is probably favours Rust too. Rust build times are much slower than Zig, I get that, but I rarely optimize software for build times.

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drdexebtjl 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Zig is not pre-1.0 because it’s not ready for production (bugs or missing features), it’s pre-1.0 because they want to be able to make breaking language changes.

Nowadays when you can just point an agent at release notes and have it update everything, I actually prefer not having to wait through rare major releases to get new language features.

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Aurornis 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Zig is not pre-1.0 because it’s not ready for production (bugs or missing features), it’s pre-1.0 because they want to be able to make breaking language changes.

This is a solved problem in other projects. Either use the version numbers as intended and bump the major version number on breaking changes, or use Rust-style editions to opt in to the newer versions of the changes.

Calling a project production-ready but keeping the version number below 1.0 and saying breaking changes are expected is a tired game. We've seen it backfire across a number of language projects like Elm, where the exact same claim was used to both encourage people to use it and then blame them when it backfired.

If it's production ready, go to 1.0 and then follow semver for breaking changes. I don't care if we get to Zig v73.2.0 as a result. At least we can see from a glance which versions need to be checked for breaking changes.

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em-bee 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

languages ideally should not have breaking changes ever.

on the other hand, a language with frequent breaking changes should not be considered production ready.

people are of course free to live on the edge, and if someone decided that zig is good enough and they are not bothered by breaking changes then they are free to use it for their production system, but that doesn't mean it's ready for everyone. so i prefer the zig approach.

	▲	bsder 8 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> languages ideally should not have breaking changes ever. I disagree MIGHTILY. This is how you wind up with C++ and Java. Languages need to be able to remove features to stay coherent. Occasionally, you get things wrong, it takes time to figure that out, and that's just the way life is.

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drdexebtjl 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[dead]

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afdbcreid 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Nowadays when you can just point an agent at release notes and have it update everything

Except that means that not only you lose compiler bugfixes, you also pretty much has no access to the ecosystem. For most production codebases, this is a deal breaker.

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rwz 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> they want to be able to make breaking language changes

That sounds like it's not ready for production to me.

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drdexebtjl 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I invite you to read the release notes and see for yourself the types of breaking changes we’re talking about.

To me it is not much different from Lua, which despite being on 5.x for decades, makes breaking changes on minor releases (because it predates SemVer).

I also don’t see it being much different from any other language or language runtime that has a major release every year.

It’s fine to update at your own pace.

	▲	uaksom an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> I invite you to read the release notes and see for yourself the types of breaking changes we’re talking about. I did, and I immediately found this in the latest release: https://ziglang.org/download/0.16.0/release-notes.html#IO-as... That seems like it would require changing a lot of code. Calling it "production ready" is dishonest at best