[klyrs]

You say "minus compile time execution"... but when you take comptime away from Zig, you lose both generics and compile-time reflection. The remaining language is C without a preprocessor. So, yeah. Strip out the most useful and innovative feature from the language, and it looks primitive.

[pjmlp]

The languages I mentioned all got generics during their lifetime, so yeah they were all more powerful than C.

C won due to UNIX, had UNIX not been a kind of free beer that companies could build their workstations with and universities avoid paying for commercial OSes like VMS, history would have taken a different path.

[klyrs]

What about compile-time type reflection?

Also, lisp has pretty much always been more powerful than C. But what zig brings to the table is an extremely simple language which is also very powerful. Much of the power results from the entire language being available at compile time. You seem so ready to throw that away in favor of could-have-been nostalgia, I wonder if you've taken the time to understand what you're criticizing.

[pjmlp]

I was quite clear that compile-time type reflection was the only thing missing.

Zig isn't the only AOT compiled language with compile-time type reflection in 2021, and exactly because of could-have-been nostalgia, we don't need newer systems programming languages that don't have an answer for use-after-free in safe code.

https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/2301

https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/1966

Naturally I have taken the time, and did not come out impressed, given my background and programming language beliefs.

However as I say in another thread, other people seem to be happy with such shortcomings.