Comment by chrisandchris

Comment by chrisandchris a day ago

3 replies

Contributions to the Zig language or contributions to software using Zig (the latter is the one the post is about as I understand)?

If so, I believe Zig will stay within a niche. Lower entry barriers allow "script kiddies" to easily start withe language, and they eventually will become leading engineers. Only a few people tend to go straight for the highest practice without "playing around". IMHO the reason, why PHP got so popular (it was not good back then, just very very easy to start with).

hardwaresofton a day ago

> Contributions to the Zig language or contributions to software using Zig (the latter is the one the post is about as I understand)?

Yes.

I think a contributor that really wanted to help the ecosystem would start in the stdlib and then start moving outwards. Even if it was LLM-assisted, I think it could be high value.

IIRC Loris already has an engine for building websites with Zig, but making sure that every Zig library has docs (similar to rustdocs) might be a great start. It is incredibly useful to have a resource like rustdocs, both the tooling and the web sites that are easily browsable.

Again, maybe everyone in the Zig ecosystem just has amazing editor setups and massive brains, but I personally really like the ease of browsing rustdoc.

> If so, I believe Zig will stay within a niche. Lower entry barriers allow "script kiddies" to easily start withe language, and they eventually will become leading engineers. Only a few people tend to go straight for the highest practice without "playing around". IMHO the reason, why PHP got so popular (it was not good back then, just very very easy to start with).

I agree, but I'd add that the niche they're aiming for is systems programming, so they're probably fine :). The average hacker there is expecting C/C++ or to be near the metal, and I think Zig is a great fit there. They're likely not going to convince people who write Ruby, but it feels reasonable for C hackers.

Also I want to just be clear that I think Zig has a lot of motivating factors! They're doing amazing things like zig cc, unbelievably easy, "can't believe it's not butter" cross-compilation, their new explicit/managed I/O mechanism, explicit allocators as a default, comptime, better type ergonomics. It's a pretty impressive language.

  • flohofwoe a day ago

    > already has an engine for building websites with Zig, but making sure that every Zig library has docs

    Tbh, this sort of auto-generated docs from source code is not all that useful, since you get that same information right in the IDE via the language server.

    The important documentation part that's currently missing is how everything is supposed to work together in the stdlib, not the 'micro-documentation' of what a single type or function does. And for this sort of information it's currently indeed better to look at example code (e.g. the stdlib's testing code).

    IMHO it's way too early for this type of high-level documentation, since things change all the time in the stdlib. Putting much work into documenting concepts that are discarded again anyway doesn't make much sense.

    • BobbyJo a day ago

      Tests very often don't tell you the right way to use something, especially when you're talking about IO libraries. Examples themselves often don't even show the "correct" way, but rather just a way that will work in ideal circumstances.