[Spex_guy]

I can't comment for all the other people who are posting and voting for those posts, but at least for me Zig has quickly become my language of choice for side projects. Its cross compilation features alone are enough for it to replace the system C/C++ compiler toolchains I used to use, and the language itself is everything I'm looking for. Readable (IMO) syntax, proper namespaces, order independent declarations, powerful metaprogramming, and an unmatched level of internal consistency all make it stand out to me. It feels like a massively simplified C++, a native language that improves significantly on C without introducing a massive set of unrelated features.

[jeremyjh]

It seems strange to compare to C++ when it has none of the features that most define C++ like RAII, OOP & templates. Its not really "simplified" - its something totally different.

[jhgb]

Presumably the idea is that lots of things that you basically have to use C++ for today because C alone is weak could be served by Zig instead, not that Zig and C++ are comparable languages.

[xedrac]

I really like Zig, but the lack of RAII means we're back to malloc/free style programming, and I would never opt into that unless Rust could not be used (e.g. binary size too large). Having said that, it's way better than C and I hope it does well.

[tw102]

Unfortunately malloc-free is unavoidable if you're writing code that needs to allocate memory rather carefully (e.g. guaranteeing no OOMs—Rust has many situations where it'll silently heap alloc and then panic on OOM). Looks like Zig has accepted that it'll be used for those situations and decided to make that experience really good, instead of deciding to be a rustalike or insist on RAII. I think that's an appropriate choice! It makes me excited to use C less.

[Arnavion]

RAII and explicit allocators are independent concerns. That Rust chose a bad default in having 1) a static global allocator, and 2) an expectation of infallible allocations from said global allocator that was then made pervasive in its libstd and third-party ecosystem, has nothing to do with the fact that it has lifetime-based destructors. Having explicit allocators does not mean you need to `free` manually instead of via an automatically-called destructor. A type that allocates needs to ensure a corresponding free in its dtor, and then every other code that uses the type gets the lifetime-based cleanup for free.

[jhgb]

I imagine that Zig has a lot more focus on "I can't use X in my environment" types of situation. It seems that for many such situations it might be a better fit than Rust.

[ncmncm]

There is, for practical purposes, noplace where one can't use C++, except where gatekeepers exercise power keep it out. Typically it would be only a day's work to get those building with a C++ compiler, whence they could begin modernizing.

There are plenty of loadable modules in C++ for Linux and BSDs, and plugins for Postgres, in places where there is no expectation of upstreaming them.

Zig is in a similar boat.

[kaba0]

Not really back to that. Zig just chooses a different way to deal with memory, namely different compilation modes and faster write-compile-test cycles.

It’s a different tradeoff which may be worth it for some use-cases. But it’s definitely not obvious whether it is worse, as the alternative comes with a huge complexity on the language side.

[jeremyjh]

It is possible they will add a type level resource release obligation at some point. It would not be anything quite like the Rust borrow checker but I think would be a big help. https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/782

[kaba0]

Well, Zig’s compile time metaprogramming capabilities do rival that of C++’s in a much more simple way, imo.

[int_19h]

It does have comptime, which covers a lot of the same ground as templates (and generics, in other languages).

[anonymoushn]

comptime seems like a superset of templates. The target audience was probably not using OOP. People do come by the discord to chat about how nice RAII is though.