I think this is a major problem with Zig in that they've cornered themselves into not utilizing AI and have attracted anti-AI absolutist crowd that is going to be a major hinderance.
As a Rust user, AI has put Rust easily in the hands of developers who were previously intimidated by it. I've learned a ton about Rust simply by fiddling with LLMs and asking questions to other Rust devs who don't really care whether AI is used.
As soon as you give into the mob rule, your existence is going to depend entirely on the ideology of the crowd and you lose the ability to adapt and remain competitive. ex) "modern audience" games from large studios.
You are free to use AI to write Zig code just not use AI to write code for Zig. In fact, many people already do build software with zig written by AI. Check out rockorager's github.
well, it also made by the same guy behind the boring go book
which probably means that boring go is also most likely AI generated
nowadays before reading or buying any book, we need to extensively investigate the author, the author name is now more important than ever, i think whenever a book is shared, the author need to me highlighted
> nowadays before reading or buying any book, we need to extensively investigate the author
I mean not really. You read a paragraph or two and notice the quality of the text, start getting suspicious and continue two or three paragraphs more, notice some very basic inconsistencies/incoherence, realize it's AI-written and ctrl+w the tab (or put back the book in the shelf) and move on with your life.
If there is no samples of the book, I'd hesitate to even consider buying it, just so you can actually sample the text. Very easy in bookstores luckily, so not a huge problem in the end.
If someone wanted an AI generated Zig tutorial, why wouldn't they go to their favorite LLM supplier and simply prompt the AI for one? Why do we need someone to create this spam ahead of time? LLMs are improving all the time and Zig is a moving target. Seems like a win-win-win. The end-user gets a better (and potentially customized) tutorial for the latest Zig, and there is less overall spam pollution.
I don't have the answers to those questions, and I don't know why I'm being asked those either. I don't like AI-slop either, I don't think anyone except the ones who produce it themselves like it.
But ultimately it's a fools errand trying to stop/get people to do something, best you can do is adjust your own approach.
i think for consumer protection, AI products need to be flagged as AI products, clearly labelled as AI produced or assisted , of course for free goods the burden is on us, but for anything we pay for, I hope we get this protection
Is Zig just a trend, or will it become a solidly established language? After all, learning something is an investment of time. With Zig, it doesn't seem to have the same kind of industry pressure as Rust. There's talk in open source circles about AI-related issues, and on Hacker News people say good things about Zig. The allocator concept looks great. But there's also a possibility that it won't become mainstream, like the D language. I personally like D and think its compiler is beautiful, but being linguistically good is different from being industrially adopted. So should I learn Zig, or wait a bit longer?
For now, I have a basic grasp of C#, a little Python, a little C++, and a little TypeScript. I also know Java to some extent, but honestly, what I mostly build is CRUD app assembly. To go deeper, I think I need to dig into a systems language. But I'm not sure whether to invest in Zig or Rust.
Here is where I think Zig shines. When you are a high level programmer that needs to drop down to a low level programming language for performance reasons. The issue with doing that as a high level programmer is that you don't do a lot of low level work frequently.
So unless you work in another domain where you do a lot of low level programming, then every time you drop down you will be out of practice. This favors using a simpler low level language, with low friction for integration. Rust and C++ don't handle being used infrequently, but C with it's simpler standard library and syntax fits this nicely. But it doesn't have things you expect for a modern programming language, and it is also has a lot of dangerous footguns that are easy to forget if you are out of practice
In comes Zig. It's low level, comes with it's own toolchain that makes it pleasant to work with, easy to cross compile, has more safety features built in that C, but is not overly complicated. The code tends to be more verbose, but also more straightforward. So it's a perfect language to pair, when you know you won't be able to do everything in a high level language.
For me that's what seals the deal. I'd argue that Odin has a nicer syntax, but there is a reason that tools like cargo-zigbuild^1 exists. The fact projects not related to Zig are willing to ship Zig toolchains to make lives easier is a testament to how seriously Zig takes this.
I think if you need to get so close to the bare metal that you'd need unsafe Rust then the equivalent Zig is also too dangerous to use "infrequently". Stuff like writing raw assembly, pointer twiddling, volatile stores or fetches - I would hire somebody with lots more experience to do that properly once if you need it.
On the other hand if safe Rust is an option that's way more handholding than you're getting in Zig. Lots of "Whoops I forgot" mistakes won't even compile in safe Rust because it couldn't see why they're OK and that's required but in Zig now you've written a bug.
For clarity in this dual programming language scenario I'm talking about, I'm writing a user facing app that's mostly a lot of business logic.
It's running slow so I profile it and I see my math function in pure Dart (or whatever language you are writing in) is the hot spot, and pressures the garbage collector too much, so I rewrite the function in a lower level language that doesn't have as much overhead, to speed things up. Then I just call it from the higher level language through the FFI.
The benefit of Zig is the syntax is simple, and the build steps are simple, so it doesn't slow down app development too much
Looking at it from an existing knowledge base and error checking point of view, I feel like C++ smart pointers or Rust is a better option for someone doing a dangerous low level thing rarely. I'm not sure Zig is really all that favorable a choice in your given scenario.
If you want to learn systems programming, I can recommend learning C. If you want to learn a programming language which allows systems programming, I guess Rust is not a bad choice. But it might be less helpful if the systems basics are unknown.
I'm an industrial equipment programmer, so I do see C quite often. Actually, aside from C, it's just that when I first learned programming in college, I started with C. I thought that was only natural, but I guess I didn't explain enough. Inside my own head, C just feels like a given.
I'd say it's worth learning new languages even purely for the sake and love of learning! That goes to both Rust and Zig, Rust is arguably more intellectually interesting, whereas with Zig you'll probably be writing useable hobby projects much quicker (I decided to tackle learning Zig and reading Crafting Interpreters simultaneously, transliterating the code in the book as I went along).
Zig will be much easier to learn than Rust, but it's worth noting that it's syntactically very unstable between releases (there were some huge changes between 0.15.2 and 0.16 to anything involving IO).
It's really hard to predict what you'll actually use professionally in the future or what's going to be popular in ten years, but some of the greatest value comes from just learning a huge variety of topics.
I'm a firm believer in prioritising enjoyment over utility, and I've always found that utility has flowed backwards from the enjoyment. And even if it doesn't, you've had a good time and found yourself richer for it!
Is there a particular domain you'd like to get into? It sounds like you're wanting to build expertise in something other than CRUD app assembly, but my language recommendations might change based on whether that's embedded, game development, distributed systems, system administration, etc.
I don't think in your shoes I'd prioritize learning Zig for any of these domains, though, for a few reasons:
* It's not a pre-req for understanding some existing corpus of important software (which is a big reason for C and C++ in 2026) or the language of choice for some current hot domain (as Python is for AI).
* It's not memory-safe, which (whether via GC or Rust's borrow checker) is increasingly viewed as a critical security attribute.
* It's not stable yet, so I'd expect a certain amount of running to keep in place both in your learning and in avoiding bitrot in anything you write in it.
* From the outside, the community seems strangely hostile as well as elitist.
A few I might suggest instead: Rust (both as a language I personally like and as the most different from the ones you've already touched), Go (which is a good choice for employability), SQL (maybe you already know this one if you're doing CRUD stuff but you didn't list it), bash, and more Python and/or TypeScript.
> Linters are not exactly a new idea, and they can be pushed quite far.
That's not an answer. There's a reason why you can't do it in C, and the reason is "the stdlib is poorly designed". No amount of linting can get you around that.
I predict it will go the way of Ruby but far less adoption or jobs available since Zig community as a whole is anti-AI, which makes it impossible to operate with modern times.
You're not wrong at the high level, but learning a particular language to the point of fluency is still an investment if you're interested in being productive while writing it. Sure, once you have the experience, reading most new languages is easy -- but learning the idioms and particular syntactic choices of a new language to that point that you can reach for them without having to constantly search or consult references isn't something that's instant. There's also a mental cost to how many of those languages you can have "ready to go" in your brain at any given time, and for languages that are evolving -- most of them, at this point, honestly, even old languages like C++ -- there's a cost to keeping up with the language as it changes.
All of that is investment, and not all languages pay off that investment.
Personal thoughts: I think Zig will become more stable once 1.0 tag released. Currently I cant find a fix to my error in net. But the folks on Zig Discord server helping me out.
I'm suspicious that the user base is people who like to program using pointers in business logic. So, the subset of current C programmers who are willing to switch.
With this in mind: Does anyone here program in Zig, or know someone who does who is not a current C (or C++) programmer?
I program in zig. I am not a current C/C++ programmer (last time I touched C++ was 2003; I can read C ~just fine... write, uh, I just hate make, okay?).
Most recently I have used zig for:
Linux USB driver for a proprietary industrial digital camera that claude hacked the protocol for (I usbpcap'ped it), bound into an embedded Elixir-Nerves biology workstation. Same workstation has a libtoupcap digital camera for a microscope camera also mounted (here I use zig for the dlload boundary with elixir). The proprietary system I am running it on ironically won't work with windows anymore because the proprietary software it shipped with chokes when there are two cameras attached.
I ship zigler, the embed-zig-in-elixir library. I keep finding more and more uses for it!
I'm professionally a python programmer with no C/C++ experience, and I do some hobby programming in zig. I tried rust but it seemed complicated and kind of boring. Zig was a lot easier for me to get into. I don't mind that it's obscure and a bit of a moving target, but I have yet to do anything really "serious" with it.
Unless you’re actively promoting one of the languages for financial gain, you have nothing to lose by delaying commitment to one, both, or either. If any of them have lasting value, they will be as easy to pick up in the future as they are now. Nobody cares about the old Java or .NET versions where both suffered from limited implementations of generics and other things, and nobody is a better programmer for having used them back then compared to picking them up today.
Learning a language is ultimately for the purpose of building something, so doing both is a bit difficult. Personally, I find Zig easier and more approachable than Rust, so I've been reading about it, but I'm worried about what I can actually do with it
Yup. Rust tries to make it hard to do systems programming poorly. Zig tries to make it easy to do systems programming well. Rust pushes you into certain (good) practices. Zig makes it exceptionally easy to understand what's happening, making good practices the obvious choice.
How crazy is it to have a language where combining two foundation traits is such a huge footgun that the linter has to warn you (but somehow you can't ban it within the language)
Rust didn't have nearly the industry adoption it does now back in 2020, but it was gaining traction in various parts of the community. If you learned it back then it was either because you love it, or you thought it had staying power.
I think Zig does, specifically because of its build system and it's C interopt story. Plus Zig has the added advantage that learning it teaches you about how the computer works, how memory gets laid out, etc. So even if it never gets wide adoption the skills are highly transferable.
It's unsafe and intentionally crashes on windows newlines and tabs. If C adopts defer, I don't think there will be enough of a differentiation to overcome the cynical user hostility.
Just because people don't like this doesn't mean it's not true.
I feel that Zig will stay a niche language. In this world, there is no reason for corporations to use anything but Rust for this kind of code. And without the corporate push, it will probably still exist for a long time, but the D trajectory is what I predict. I really like the language and I hope it gets more popular, but it seems unlikely to me.
The situation will improve once they release a stable 1.0 version.
Until then, use mise, nix, docker, or something similar. (You should be doing this anyway for projects in all languages if you care about them building on anyone's machine other than your own.)
Historically, say, 15 years ago before 1.0, Rust too was always shifting about and so you'd find that the software you wrote last month now doesn't even compile and the advice has changed.
Today most people write entirely stable† Rust, and as somebody else mentioned Rust uses Editions to allow it to make any remaining language improvements, but if you were writing mostly unstable Rust you would see a reduced version of the same churn. Last month you could foozle.boozle() and that gets you a Wibble, but then you upgraded and now foozle doesn't have a boozle method, and apparently Wibbles no longer exist at all, everybody says you need to learn about Wumps instead now because those are apparently better or something?
† If you don't use a "nightly" build of Rust or a special opt-in "nightly mode" your Rust compiler only recognises the stable language.
Encapsulating arguments inside .{} seems superfluous and noisy.
I'm sure this can be rationalized in some way, to either simplify parsing or solve some rare ambiguity, but I just don't see it.
I know this is a minor thing and can be considered as nitpicky, and I expect some friction with syntax when learning a new language, but I just can't stand things I see as gratuitous. Same with the forced use of _ = foo(.{}); to avoid compiling errors...
In Zig, function arguments are not wrapped in `.{}`. `.{}` is the syntax for creating a struct or a tuple. This is used as a pattern for allowing optional arguments (options struct) and variadic functions (tuple).
Explicitly discarding return values is a thing many modern programming languages force you to do.
> Encapsulating arguments inside .{} seems superfluous and noisy.
You don't do this? This is only for varargs or optionals.
.{<stuff>} is just a shorthand for Type{<stuff>} (struct constructor) plus, "hey compiler, you figure out the type". So if anything it's LESS noisy than the alternative, and more forward-compatible if you change a type name for example.
I see it this way, the full signature for defining a variable is:
var foo: Foo = Foo{};
There's two ways to shorten it:
var foo = Foo{};
var foo: Foo = .{};
It can infer the type of the var from the right hand side; or the type of the right side from the type of the var.
So when you see .{} as an argument, it is inferring the type from the function signature. It happens to be empty only because it's using default values (or is a tuple with 0 items).
Point being, these two things aren't different (variable assignment and function calls); IIUC they go through the same analysis pathway, result location semantics.
Very brief. I'm not sure what this adds over reading the language documentation (which itself is not great). As it's entirely organized by language features it doesn't really talk about any larger scale design decisions, which is where I think language proficiency is really found.
For what it's worth, the concurrency model is very similar to the one in Go. Zig has std.Io.Queue instead of channels, std.Io.async and std.Io.concurrent instead of the go keyword, and switch over std.Io.Select instead of the select keyword. There are lots of resources on concurrency in Go, and the learning semantics would carry nicely over to Zig.
Best bet is tight integration with a language server and the zig docs as MD locally. You may also pull in the zig source code as canonical reference for best practices.
From there you can derive a set of tools and references that you can build skills on.
Any LLM can scratch together an MCP server, its basically FastAPI + functionality. Your goal, then, is to identify the subset of tools and data required to get 'good' output.
If you want to test your MCP server implementation, grab the source of several popular zig projects, rewind their git history, and have your LLM of choice attempt to address PRs for issues on those repos. Compare LLM solutions with the repo solutions, grade on token spend, LOC produced, variance from Zig best practices, and so on.
This is outdated and AI generated.
If you want a good source of zig learning material interactive and by examples please check out ziglings: https://codeberg.org/ziglings
It's writen and tested by humans, which is essential for learning purposes. It's listed in the official zig website, by the way.
This project is always up to date to the latest zig release.
I think this is a major problem with Zig in that they've cornered themselves into not utilizing AI and have attracted anti-AI absolutist crowd that is going to be a major hinderance.
As a Rust user, AI has put Rust easily in the hands of developers who were previously intimidated by it. I've learned a ton about Rust simply by fiddling with LLMs and asking questions to other Rust devs who don't really care whether AI is used.
As soon as you give into the mob rule, your existence is going to depend entirely on the ideology of the crowd and you lose the ability to adapt and remain competitive. ex) "modern audience" games from large studios.
You are free to use AI to write Zig code just not use AI to write code for Zig. In fact, many people already do build software with zig written by AI. Check out rockorager's github.
well, it also made by the same guy behind the boring go book which probably means that boring go is also most likely AI generated
nowadays before reading or buying any book, we need to extensively investigate the author, the author name is now more important than ever, i think whenever a book is shared, the author need to me highlighted
> nowadays before reading or buying any book, we need to extensively investigate the author
I mean not really. You read a paragraph or two and notice the quality of the text, start getting suspicious and continue two or three paragraphs more, notice some very basic inconsistencies/incoherence, realize it's AI-written and ctrl+w the tab (or put back the book in the shelf) and move on with your life.
If there is no samples of the book, I'd hesitate to even consider buying it, just so you can actually sample the text. Very easy in bookstores luckily, so not a huge problem in the end.
You can just read a paragraph or two of each email, and then decide whether or not to delete them. We don't additional tools to combat spam.
Kind of feels like a slightly different thing, I don't spend days/weeks reading through one email.
If someone wanted an AI generated Zig tutorial, why wouldn't they go to their favorite LLM supplier and simply prompt the AI for one? Why do we need someone to create this spam ahead of time? LLMs are improving all the time and Zig is a moving target. Seems like a win-win-win. The end-user gets a better (and potentially customized) tutorial for the latest Zig, and there is less overall spam pollution.
I don't have the answers to those questions, and I don't know why I'm being asked those either. I don't like AI-slop either, I don't think anyone except the ones who produce it themselves like it.
But ultimately it's a fools errand trying to stop/get people to do something, best you can do is adjust your own approach.
we don't pay for emails either
i think for consumer protection, AI products need to be flagged as AI products, clearly labelled as AI produced or assisted , of course for free goods the burden is on us, but for anything we pay for, I hope we get this protection
I just looked this up yesterday so sharing some more up-to-date resources for those interested in Zig:
- Learning Zig by Karl Seguin: https://www.openmymind.net/learning_zig/
- https://zig.guide/
- Free project-based online book Introduction to Zig by Pedro Park: https://pedropark99.github.io/zig-book.
- Ziglings, almost working programs you need to fix: https://codeberg.org/ziglings/exercises
"More up-to-date" meaning more sources that are also up to date like the OP, or meaning that the OP is not up to date? Silly English language!
Zig by Example seems to target Zig 0.14 at the moment. The links I posted should hopefully target version 0.15+
Ah, but are those changes in the training data yet?
Probably not, but if this is all AI slop then why bother to read it? There's real documentation (and/or just code). Use it
there's no question of if here...
Also build system and c interop is outdated
Is Zig just a trend, or will it become a solidly established language? After all, learning something is an investment of time. With Zig, it doesn't seem to have the same kind of industry pressure as Rust. There's talk in open source circles about AI-related issues, and on Hacker News people say good things about Zig. The allocator concept looks great. But there's also a possibility that it won't become mainstream, like the D language. I personally like D and think its compiler is beautiful, but being linguistically good is different from being industrially adopted. So should I learn Zig, or wait a bit longer?
For now, I have a basic grasp of C#, a little Python, a little C++, and a little TypeScript. I also know Java to some extent, but honestly, what I mostly build is CRUD app assembly. To go deeper, I think I need to dig into a systems language. But I'm not sure whether to invest in Zig or Rust.
Here is where I think Zig shines. When you are a high level programmer that needs to drop down to a low level programming language for performance reasons. The issue with doing that as a high level programmer is that you don't do a lot of low level work frequently.
So unless you work in another domain where you do a lot of low level programming, then every time you drop down you will be out of practice. This favors using a simpler low level language, with low friction for integration. Rust and C++ don't handle being used infrequently, but C with it's simpler standard library and syntax fits this nicely. But it doesn't have things you expect for a modern programming language, and it is also has a lot of dangerous footguns that are easy to forget if you are out of practice
In comes Zig. It's low level, comes with it's own toolchain that makes it pleasant to work with, easy to cross compile, has more safety features built in that C, but is not overly complicated. The code tends to be more verbose, but also more straightforward. So it's a perfect language to pair, when you know you won't be able to do everything in a high level language.
For me that's what seals the deal. I'd argue that Odin has a nicer syntax, but there is a reason that tools like cargo-zigbuild^1 exists. The fact projects not related to Zig are willing to ship Zig toolchains to make lives easier is a testament to how seriously Zig takes this.
1. https://crates.io/crates/cargo-zigbuild
I think if you need to get so close to the bare metal that you'd need unsafe Rust then the equivalent Zig is also too dangerous to use "infrequently". Stuff like writing raw assembly, pointer twiddling, volatile stores or fetches - I would hire somebody with lots more experience to do that properly once if you need it.
On the other hand if safe Rust is an option that's way more handholding than you're getting in Zig. Lots of "Whoops I forgot" mistakes won't even compile in safe Rust because it couldn't see why they're OK and that's required but in Zig now you've written a bug.
For clarity in this dual programming language scenario I'm talking about, I'm writing a user facing app that's mostly a lot of business logic.
It's running slow so I profile it and I see my math function in pure Dart (or whatever language you are writing in) is the hot spot, and pressures the garbage collector too much, so I rewrite the function in a lower level language that doesn't have as much overhead, to speed things up. Then I just call it from the higher level language through the FFI.
The benefit of Zig is the syntax is simple, and the build steps are simple, so it doesn't slow down app development too much
Looking at it from an existing knowledge base and error checking point of view, I feel like C++ smart pointers or Rust is a better option for someone doing a dangerous low level thing rarely. I'm not sure Zig is really all that favorable a choice in your given scenario.
If you want to learn systems programming, I can recommend learning C. If you want to learn a programming language which allows systems programming, I guess Rust is not a bad choice. But it might be less helpful if the systems basics are unknown.
I'm an industrial equipment programmer, so I do see C quite often. Actually, aside from C, it's just that when I first learned programming in college, I started with C. I thought that was only natural, but I guess I didn't explain enough. Inside my own head, C just feels like a given.
In that case, definitely learn Rust, it will expand your thinking about programming and be useful. Zig would just be too similar to C.
What's the difference between a trend and a solid language? I bet many (I mean like millions) people still think Rust is a trend.
> To go deeper, I think I need to dig into a systems language
Most of such code is still written in C.
But honestly, if you just need to squeeze a little bit more performance, you should check the non-GC part of C# first (ArrayPool, Span, stackalloc).
I'd say it's worth learning new languages even purely for the sake and love of learning! That goes to both Rust and Zig, Rust is arguably more intellectually interesting, whereas with Zig you'll probably be writing useable hobby projects much quicker (I decided to tackle learning Zig and reading Crafting Interpreters simultaneously, transliterating the code in the book as I went along).
Zig will be much easier to learn than Rust, but it's worth noting that it's syntactically very unstable between releases (there were some huge changes between 0.15.2 and 0.16 to anything involving IO).
It's really hard to predict what you'll actually use professionally in the future or what's going to be popular in ten years, but some of the greatest value comes from just learning a huge variety of topics.
I'm a firm believer in prioritising enjoyment over utility, and I've always found that utility has flowed backwards from the enjoyment. And even if it doesn't, you've had a good time and found yourself richer for it!
Zig is not only a language. Its whole toolchain and takes freestanding as a target seriously.
Is there a particular domain you'd like to get into? It sounds like you're wanting to build expertise in something other than CRUD app assembly, but my language recommendations might change based on whether that's embedded, game development, distributed systems, system administration, etc.
I don't think in your shoes I'd prioritize learning Zig for any of these domains, though, for a few reasons:
* It's not a pre-req for understanding some existing corpus of important software (which is a big reason for C and C++ in 2026) or the language of choice for some current hot domain (as Python is for AI).
* It's not memory-safe, which (whether via GC or Rust's borrow checker) is increasingly viewed as a critical security attribute.
* It's not stable yet, so I'd expect a certain amount of running to keep in place both in your learning and in avoiding bitrot in anything you write in it.
* From the outside, the community seems strangely hostile as well as elitist.
A few I might suggest instead: Rust (both as a language I personally like and as the most different from the ones you've already touched), Go (which is a good choice for employability), SQL (maybe you already know this one if you're doing CRUD stuff but you didn't list it), bash, and more Python and/or TypeScript.
Lindy effect is very strong in the programming languages world.
Zig is a very interesting and well built language, but it is also niche, unstable and not offering radical improvements over C.
C, as the foundation of all modern kernels and system tools, among many other things, is extremely unlikely to go away soon.
Everything you do in Zig can be done almost in the same way in C or C++.
I would say the real value of Zig is in the standard library that is more modern and arguably better.
> Everything you do in Zig can be done almost in the same way in C or C++.
Can you do this in C?
https://github.com/ityonemo/clr
Linters are not exactly a new idea, and they can be pushed quite far.
I am generally against the idea of language support for meta-programming, even using C macros or C++ templates.
I do a lot of meta-programming/codegen with external tooling.
> Linters are not exactly a new idea, and they can be pushed quite far.
That's not an answer. There's a reason why you can't do it in C, and the reason is "the stdlib is poorly designed". No amount of linting can get you around that.
I agree about the C stdlib being outdated and the worst part of C. This is why I don't use it.
A new modern C standard library would be a very good thing. But I am ok writing my own, tailored for my own needs and style.
I predict it will go the way of Ruby but far less adoption or jobs available since Zig community as a whole is anti-AI, which makes it impossible to operate with modern times.
Why do people still view languages as an investment? If you know programming then it's just a different syntax. Focus on learning programming.
You're not wrong at the high level, but learning a particular language to the point of fluency is still an investment if you're interested in being productive while writing it. Sure, once you have the experience, reading most new languages is easy -- but learning the idioms and particular syntactic choices of a new language to that point that you can reach for them without having to constantly search or consult references isn't something that's instant. There's also a mental cost to how many of those languages you can have "ready to go" in your brain at any given time, and for languages that are evolving -- most of them, at this point, honestly, even old languages like C++ -- there's a cost to keeping up with the language as it changes.
All of that is investment, and not all languages pay off that investment.
I’d prefer that you watch this video interview with Andrew Kelley. He is describing that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqddnwKF8HQ
Personal thoughts: I think Zig will become more stable once 1.0 tag released. Currently I cant find a fix to my error in net. But the folks on Zig Discord server helping me out.
I'm suspicious that the user base is people who like to program using pointers in business logic. So, the subset of current C programmers who are willing to switch.
With this in mind: Does anyone here program in Zig, or know someone who does who is not a current C (or C++) programmer?
I program in zig. I am not a current C/C++ programmer (last time I touched C++ was 2003; I can read C ~just fine... write, uh, I just hate make, okay?).
Most recently I have used zig for:
Linux USB driver for a proprietary industrial digital camera that claude hacked the protocol for (I usbpcap'ped it), bound into an embedded Elixir-Nerves biology workstation. Same workstation has a libtoupcap digital camera for a microscope camera also mounted (here I use zig for the dlload boundary with elixir). The proprietary system I am running it on ironically won't work with windows anymore because the proprietary software it shipped with chokes when there are two cameras attached.
I ship zigler, the embed-zig-in-elixir library. I keep finding more and more uses for it!
I'm professionally a python programmer with no C/C++ experience, and I do some hobby programming in zig. I tried rust but it seemed complicated and kind of boring. Zig was a lot easier for me to get into. I don't mind that it's obscure and a bit of a moving target, but I have yet to do anything really "serious" with it.
Also people who wants to get into lower level languages but is scared of C's footguns and C++/Rust language size: me.
Unless you’re actively promoting one of the languages for financial gain, you have nothing to lose by delaying commitment to one, both, or either. If any of them have lasting value, they will be as easy to pick up in the future as they are now. Nobody cares about the old Java or .NET versions where both suffered from limited implementations of generics and other things, and nobody is a better programmer for having used them back then compared to picking them up today.
Hadn't thought of that and I think you're right.
Having been exposed to Java < 5 (before generics) Arrays felt somewhat like JavaScript or PHP3. It's a lot more ergonomic today.
But there are still many remnants (like null refs, despite Option<>) that are easiest understood by tracing back Java's historical roots.
Learning a language is ultimately for the purpose of building something, so doing both is a bit difficult. Personally, I find Zig easier and more approachable than Rust, so I've been reading about it, but I'm worried about what I can actually do with it
IMO, there isn't much space left to fill that Rust couldn't already fill.
Simplicity is one thing Zig excels at (at least from my early observations).
Yup. Rust tries to make it hard to do systems programming poorly. Zig tries to make it easy to do systems programming well. Rust pushes you into certain (good) practices. Zig makes it exceptionally easy to understand what's happening, making good practices the obvious choice.
Haven't yet used Zig in anger, but it looks more like a successor to C (with a bit of Go), whereas Rust is a successor to C++, first and foremost.
How crazy is it to have a language where combining two foundation traits is such a huge footgun that the linter has to warn you (but somehow you can't ban it within the language)
Rust didn't have nearly the industry adoption it does now back in 2020, but it was gaining traction in various parts of the community. If you learned it back then it was either because you love it, or you thought it had staying power.
I think Zig does, specifically because of its build system and it's C interopt story. Plus Zig has the added advantage that learning it teaches you about how the computer works, how memory gets laid out, etc. So even if it never gets wide adoption the skills are highly transferable.
It's unsafe and intentionally crashes on windows newlines and tabs. If C adopts defer, I don't think there will be enough of a differentiation to overcome the cynical user hostility.
Just because people don't like this doesn't mean it's not true.
> C adopts defer
C will almost certainly adopt defer in the next revision standard. C++ (via RAII + scoped classes) already effectively has defer.
But the fact that it's unsafe means it's effectively unadoptable, no reason not to use C inplace of it.
I feel that Zig will stay a niche language. In this world, there is no reason for corporations to use anything but Rust for this kind of code. And without the corporate push, it will probably still exist for a long time, but the D trajectory is what I predict. I really like the language and I hope it gets more popular, but it seems unlikely to me.
Do not use this, I recommend ziglings if anything besides what Loris would say: you have to read code.
The builtins don’t even compile in these examples. This is 2 years out of date at least.
I like Zig but stopped learning it when I realized that all project based on it requires a specific version of the compiler to build.
The situation will improve once they release a stable 1.0 version.
Until then, use mise, nix, docker, or something similar. (You should be doing this anyway for projects in all languages if you care about them building on anyone's machine other than your own.)
I would be interested to learn why that is a problem. As a new Rust learner, I am curious.
It might not be the version you have installed, or the same version as another project you want to glue together into a single application.
wow. this is a major miss from Zig.
on top of the decision to ban AI, I can see that we haven't seen the last of bad decisions from Zig
Historically, say, 15 years ago before 1.0, Rust too was always shifting about and so you'd find that the software you wrote last month now doesn't even compile and the advice has changed.
Today most people write entirely stable† Rust, and as somebody else mentioned Rust uses Editions to allow it to make any remaining language improvements, but if you were writing mostly unstable Rust you would see a reduced version of the same churn. Last month you could foozle.boozle() and that gets you a Wibble, but then you upgraded and now foozle doesn't have a boozle method, and apparently Wibbles no longer exist at all, everybody says you need to learn about Wumps instead now because those are apparently better or something?
† If you don't use a "nightly" build of Rust or a special opt-in "nightly mode" your Rust compiler only recognises the stable language.
Rust has editions, which can be mixed and matched between different dependencies. AFAIK Zig does not have this.
Having quick viewed all the chapters, the examples are too simplistic to fully demonstrate Zig's syntax and semantics.
for those new, start with why: https://ziglang.org/learn/why_zig_rust_d_cpp
Encapsulating arguments inside .{} seems superfluous and noisy.
I'm sure this can be rationalized in some way, to either simplify parsing or solve some rare ambiguity, but I just don't see it.
I know this is a minor thing and can be considered as nitpicky, and I expect some friction with syntax when learning a new language, but I just can't stand things I see as gratuitous. Same with the forced use of _ = foo(.{}); to avoid compiling errors...
In Zig, function arguments are not wrapped in `.{}`. `.{}` is the syntax for creating a struct or a tuple. This is used as a pattern for allowing optional arguments (options struct) and variadic functions (tuple).
Explicitly discarding return values is a thing many modern programming languages force you to do.
I know, and I don't see unused return values as an error, it should be a warning at best.
And the compiler should be just a bit smarter to avoid the .{} thing when it is not strictly necessary.
> And the compiler should be just a bit smarter to avoid the .{} thing when it is not strictly necessary.
What's your plan for this? Rebuilding the C varargs mess from first principles?
> Encapsulating arguments inside .{} seems superfluous and noisy.
You don't do this? This is only for varargs or optionals.
.{<stuff>} is just a shorthand for Type{<stuff>} (struct constructor) plus, "hey compiler, you figure out the type". So if anything it's LESS noisy than the alternative, and more forward-compatible if you change a type name for example.
I see it this way, the full signature for defining a variable is:
There's two ways to shorten it: It can infer the type of the var from the right hand side; or the type of the right side from the type of the var.So when you see .{} as an argument, it is inferring the type from the function signature. It happens to be empty only because it's using default values (or is a tuple with 0 items).
Edit: fixed the extra dots.
that's not quite right.
1) It's var foo = Foo{...}; (no intervening dot)
2) I think parent commenter is referring to function call use case call_my_func(.{...})
1) Ah yes, just typing from memory. Point still stands.
2) Adressed in the last paragraph.
Point being, these two things aren't different (variable assignment and function calls); IIUC they go through the same analysis pathway, result location semantics.
https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/#Result-Location-Se...
It's a little bit weird, since the types flow in the reverse direction than you would expect.
Very brief. I'm not sure what this adds over reading the language documentation (which itself is not great). As it's entirely organized by language features it doesn't really talk about any larger scale design decisions, which is where I think language proficiency is really found.
My gut feelings had me check the Zig version. "Examples target Zig 0.14." Ah there we go
You would probably be better off reading learnxinyminutes.com/zig/
does zig still matter in the AI era? i was learning zig on and off and now have no motivation to learn it anymore.
lots of people into zig this morning apparently!
I am really looking into zig now because founder seems like a cool dude.
Is this much different than ziglings?
This is essentially just a textbook of zig examples. Ziglings is an interactive exercise
I'm missing the concurrency model.
For what it's worth, the concurrency model is very similar to the one in Go. Zig has std.Io.Queue instead of channels, std.Io.async and std.Io.concurrent instead of the go keyword, and switch over std.Io.Select instead of the select keyword. There are lots of resources on concurrency in Go, and the learning semantics would carry nicely over to Zig.
just read it fast and easy! for a starter like me? amazing!
3 commits? Really? Why don't I just ask Claude or chatGPT instead?
Looking for a resource (MCP, CLI, Skill, ...) that would improve Zig support in LLMs.
Currently, doing something with Zig as a target language would spend many more tokens and produce subpar results.
One of the preeminent Zig software projects, Tigerbeetle[1], has a great website[2] and markdown file[3] for what they call TigerStyle.
It's honestly a great read as a human but also I packaged it as a skill and saw coding agent improvement, especially around memory usage.
1. https://tigerbeetle.com/
2. https://tigerstyle.dev/
3. https://github.com/tigerbeetle/tigerbeetle/blob/main/docs/TI...
If you worked through this and learnt to use zig, your token usage would be even lower!
Don't be ridiculous. Learning? That's for the dinosaurs. Just throw an llm at the problem!
Both is good. I do both, and to get reasonable output from an LLM I _have_ to do both.
What's wrong with learning by reviewing the LLM generated code and asking questions interactively? Works for other languages.
Best bet is tight integration with a language server and the zig docs as MD locally. You may also pull in the zig source code as canonical reference for best practices.
From there you can derive a set of tools and references that you can build skills on.
Any LLM can scratch together an MCP server, its basically FastAPI + functionality. Your goal, then, is to identify the subset of tools and data required to get 'good' output.
If you want to test your MCP server implementation, grab the source of several popular zig projects, rewind their git history, and have your LLM of choice attempt to address PRs for issues on those repos. Compare LLM solutions with the repo solutions, grade on token spend, LOC produced, variance from Zig best practices, and so on.
Wrapping this [1] in a skill will help a lot: Also add this [2] and `zig fmt` to your buid.zig.
[1]: https://github.com/rockorager/zigdoc [2]: https://github.com/rockorager/ziglint