[hutzlibu]

It is the first time, I have heard of zig and I have to say, it indeed does sound nice. (But I haven't done low level programming in quite some time ..)

Can you maybe summarize a bit more, why you prefer it over rust?

The concept of rust, of beeing safe by default and only optimize critical parts sounds solid to me, but after a quick skimming, I have not seen such a feature for zig, too, possibly by design?

" No hidden control flow. No hidden memory allocations. No preprocessor, no macros."

[dralley]

I'm not OP, but the typical answer is that the language is small enough to be understood by any engineer with a few weeks of training, and is pretty easy for anyone familiar with C to grasp the concepts of almost immediately.

This is something that you definitely can't do with C++ and probably can't do with Rust.

For some people it's more comforting to be able to understand the entirety of the language and focus on the complexities of the problem and the implementation than to have a slightly higher level and larger language taking over the details. It's the same reason people tend to like C over C++ or Go over other languages.

This also generally translates into a couple of technical benefits as well, such as much much faster compilers relative to more complicated languages like C++ and Rust.

Personally I still find Rust much more comfortable to write code in generally but I really appreciate the elegance of the Zig approach.

[pron]

It's mostly a matter of personal taste and values. I am extremely averse to language complexity, I dislike implicitness in low-level languages, and I value fast turnaround times. Others may have different values. I think Rust and Zig might appeal to different people, so you should see if you like it for yourself (it takes 1-2 days to fully learn), but note that it is absolutely not production ready (certainly not for me). I just find its approach refreshing and even surprising, and more in the direction of what I would hope would become the future of low-level programming.

[flykespice]

> No hidden control flow

Oh boy and I was just reading (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30022022) about ISO C unsuitability for OS programming specially its implicit reordering of the control flow of the code, breaking parts that are sensitive to the machine code generated.

I wonder if that point was introduce as a response for this ISO C nuance, does this means the machine code generated by ziglang code will be explicitly what each statement does?