[pbronez]

The Zig website [0] has an FAQ for this. I’ll copy in an abridged version here for convenience:

==========

Why Zig When There is Already C++, D, and Rust?

- No hidden control flow. If Zig code doesn’t look like it’s jumping away to call a function, then it isn’t.

- No hidden allocations. Zig has a hands-off approach when it comes to heap allocation. There is no new keyword or any other language feature that uses a heap allocator. The entire concept of the heap is managed by library and application code, not by the language.

- First-class support for no standard library. Zig has an entirely optional standard library. Each std lib API only gets compiled into your program if you use it. Zig has equal support for either linking against libc or not linking against it. Zig is friendly to bare-metal and high-performance development.

- A Portable Language for Libraries. Zig is attempting to become the new portable language for libraries by simultaneously making it straightforward to conform to the C ABI for external functions, and introducing safety and language design that prevents common bugs within the implementations.

- A Package Manager and Build System for Existing Projects. Not only can you write Zig code instead of C or C++ code, but you can use Zig as a replacement for autotools, cmake, make, scons, ninja, etc. And on top of this, it (will) provide a package manager for native dependencies. This build system is intended to be appropriate even if the entirety of a project’s codebase is in C or C++.

- Simplicity. Zig has no macros and no metaprogramming, yet is still powerful enough to express complex programs in a clear, non-repetitive way. Even Rust has macros with special cases like format!, which is implemented in the compiler itself. Meanwhile in Zig, the equivalent function is implemented in the standard library with no special case code in the compiler.

- Tooling. Zig provides binary archives for Linux, Windows, macOS and FreeBSD. It is installed by downloading and extracting a single archive, no system configuration needed. It is statically compiled, uses LLVM, has out of the box cross-compilation to most major platforms, and ships w/ libc source and dynamically compiles when needed. The Zig build system has caching and compiles C and C++ code with libc support

==========

[0] https://ziglang.org/learn/why_zig_rust_d_cpp/

[b3morales]

> Simplicity. Zig has no macros and no metaprogramming

This one is an odd point; this very article is a demonstration of metaprogramming*:

> Thanks to Zig’s type reflection we can read a row of data into a user-provided type without needing to write any “mapping” function: we know the type we want to read (here the User struct) and can analyse it at compile-time.

* Which is a feature I favor, for the record.

[throwawaymaths]

I think the poster meant "no macros" (and especially no c-style lexical macros)

[formerly_proven]

No metaprogramming as in no separate metalanguage (e.g. templates, macro_rules!)

[avgcorrection]

Homogeneous metaprogramming is a thing...

[noodledoodletwo]

Yea I feel like most of these differentiators aren't things most people care about barring one. Tight integrations with c/c++ is potentially useful, beyond that I don't really get it. It's kind of like Hare in that regard?

[stonemetal12]

In general those are the reasons I see people give for why they still use C instead of C++ or newer languages. Also all of those things were, and maybe still are necessary for embedded systems where C still dominates.

To me it comes down to Zig is a "modern" C, but unlike most other attempts at replacing C it doesn't skip some of C's use cases.

[noodledoodletwo]

See I got downvoted a bit... Let me rephrase, other modern languages offer something along the lines of these, of the things that aren't there for say rust, close integration with c/c++ is nice. Ie rust has nostd, etc.

[ptato]

out of that list, rust doesn't offer "no macros and no metaprogramming" and "no hidden control flow". maybe these just aren't things you care about?

[noodledoodletwo]

Yea but for the most part you can avoid macros, and areas where you can't you can consider them to be keywords in my opinion anyways. Macros aren't all bad, but they do get abused a lot and make a nightmare for others. Fwiw Ive only written one macro and it was for learning purposes only.