Comment by norir

From my perspective, Zig is trying to do far too many things to ever reach a baseline of goodness that I consider acceptable. They are in my view quite disrespectful to their users who they force to endure churn at the whims of their dictator. Now that enough people have bought in and accepted that a broken tool is ok so long as it hasn't been blessed with a 1.0 all of its clear flaws can be overlooked in the hope of the coming utopia (spoiler alert: that day will never arrive).

Personally, I think it is wrong to inflict your experiments on other people and when you pull the rug out from underneath say, well, we told you it was unstable, you should't have depended on us in the first place.

I don't even understand what zig is supposed to be. Matklad seems to think it is a machine level language: https://lobste.rs/s/ntruuu/lobsters_interview_with_matklad. This contrasts with the official language landing page: Zig is a general-purpose programming language and toolchain for maintaining robust, optimal and reusable software. These two definitions are mutually incompatible. Moreover, zig is clearly not a general purpose language because there are plenty of programming problems where manual memory management is neither needed nor desirable.

All of this confusion is manifest in zig's instability and bloated standard library. Indeed a huge standard library is incompatible with the claims of simplicity and generality they frequently make. Async is not a feature that can be implemented universally without adding overhead and indirection because of the fundamental differences in capabilities exposed by the various platforms. Again, they are promising a silver bullet even though their prior attempt, in which they publicly proclaimed function coloring to be solved, has been abandoned. Why would we trust them to get it right a second time?

There are a very small number of assembly primitives that every platform provides that are necessary to implement a compiler. Load/store/mov/inc/jeq/jump and perhaps a few others. Luajit implements its parser in pure assembly and I am not aware of an important platform that luajit runs on that zig goes. I do the vast majority of my programming in lua and _never_ run into bugs in the interpreter. I truly cannot think of a single problem that I think zig would solve better than luajit. Even if that did exist, I could embed the zig code in my lua file and use lua to drive the zig compiler and then call into the specialized code using the lua ffi. But the vast majority of code does not need to be optimized to the level of machine code where it is worth putting up with all of the other headaches that adopting zig will create.

The hype around zig is truly reaching llm levels of disconnection from reality. Again, to believe in zig, one has to believe it will magically develop capacities that it does not presently have and for which there is no plan to actually execute besides vague plans of just wait.