|capture| hides an inconsistency that bugs me – everywhere else, assignment to a variable flows leftwards. |capture| is an unnatural rightwards assignment.

in general, I like zig syntax, but i find that it had very little regard to how the eye moves on the page. it’s jarring at times.

I saw that article previously. Nearly all of the syntax seem to be in-house with little benefit. All the examples could just use some modern c-like thing.

Zig has benefits, like comptime, no hidden control flow, memory mngmt, cross compilation etc. But its syntax is just a mouthfull of wats, whys and wtfs.

I can forsee a compile to Zig languge popping up sometime soon.

with LLMs? syntax doesn't really matter anymore exactly because of what you mentioned in your last sentence.

it's also my opinion. Which makes me wonder : isn't there an opportunity to create a variant of rust that would make absolutely zero compromise on UB and safety at the detriment of user experience ( which we don't care about now, with AI generating the code) ?

Like programming in a kind of super strict IL. Or the opposite : super poweful, super abstract language, yet extremely strict.

> The borrow checker will catch all kinds of bugs that AI-generated code will happily compile in Zig but will blow up as UB at runtime.

This has not been my experience; Claude does a great job of writing unit tests for the Zig code, and combined with Zig's fuzzing features and a Python-based integration testing suite, I have avoided hitting runtime UB so far. In exchange, I get much faster compile times, which are important for the agentic development loop.

So far claude has been fine to generated zig code. Dont have lots of issues. Tijy local models have more problems with zig, need additional instructions.

In general, what helps is to instruct ai to use test coverage to ensure the cover all edge cases with tests.

Use Rust if you want to write in a memory safe, high performance language.

> Zig's value prop is different and closer to a modern C: it fits in your head and it maps fairly closely to assembly.

This can't be correct for the simple reason that it has both a modern optimizing compiler (LLVM) and UB.

A modern compiler will try to autovectorize your code, so you don't really know what the assembly will be.

UB gives compiler license to rewrite your code however it sees fit.

Can LLMs not write Zig code ? I'm not really understanding your explanation for why we can write other languages with LLM but not Zig here.

> Rust trades the low-level clarity for compiler-enforced safety. If you're not a code artisan or don't care about being one, then please use Rust.

Not really seeing the connection here. What do you mean by code artisan? Are you trying to gatekeep Zig because you think Zig is too difficult for LLMs?

> You're the pilot, not the compiler.

This to me reads like an LLMism.

This is the weirdest basis for comparing a language I've ever seen. Zig is one line as well, `std.debug.print("Hello, world!\n", .{});`, unless you're counting defining main and its brackets as 4 lines, in which case... Rust has that too, Java is 7 lines and C# is 8 lines to import System library and define the Program class as well if you're not using top-level statements / implicit usings.

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Edit for replies complaining I used debug.print:

Okay, `try std.io.getStdOut().writer().print("Hello, world!\n", .{});`. Still one line, more explicit with chained methods, but that still just goes to show you how arbitrary this metric is -- Zig's standard library makes you be more explicit with one function, but it doesn't make you be as explicit with another one that works essentially the same way but writes to a different stream, ergo this has nothing to do with the language's inherent explicitness but rather comparing the implementation of a single random function.

As does C++ and other languages. What is so special about Zig that you cannot use LLMs with it? Please provide examples.

Rust is quite slow but that is an interesting benefit but still not sure what the trade offs are, Rust has a huge mature ecosystem and there are lot of jobs for it.

Are you able to ship faster with Zig vs Rust? How did you arrive at the 4x figure?

I'm really puzzled why people are so angry over using ai assistance with Zig. LLMs are always going to be able to write better code faster and better than anyone who calls themselves code artisans in this day and age.

I think this comment posted a while back someone who worked on Zig is pretty telling:

> The key problem with Zig nowadays is how much of its community and adoption is driven by anti-Rust sentiment. As a result, while Rust puts beginner onboarding and documentation at the center of its culture, as opposed to the “C neckbeard”'s culture, Zig is going the other way around.

And ultimately this didn't stop people from using AI generating Zig code as much of the users in the thread are already using it to ship quality faster.

Happy to use the work the community outputs and culture is largely irrelevant when prompting LLMs outputs code that doesn't really require any intimate knowledge with the syntaxes