[lionkor]

I really enjoy reading Zig, I always struggle writing it because its so subtly different from the other languages I use, like C, Rust and Go, that I get confused often.

I really hope Zig becomes stable soon so I can use it on non-throwaway projects

[hansvm]

Here's my opinion from the Zig evangelism strike force:

Aside from the removal of async (which was very disruptive for a few of my projects), the rest of the changes over the last few years have been minor. It takes a few hours once a year to update a few tens of thousands of lines of code to the new syntax, build system, and stdlib. The current 0.12.0 is supposed to be a semi-stable release for people to be happy with pre-1.0, reducing that effort further, and language stability is an express design goal, so once 1.0 hits (ETA 3-5yrs?) it'll almost certainly be good enough for you.

I do think the initial learning curve was higher than I would have expected for such a simple language. The docs are much better now, and there are more examples and learning resources (off-topic, definitely use the zig-help channel in their discord server). I just finished making a compelling enough prototype that $WORK wants to use Zig for some performance-critical software. I suspect it'll be easier for my team to learn than it was for me. We'll see (whether it succeeds or fails, that sounds like a fun first blog post).

Despite that higher-than-expected learning curve (which IMO was mostly because nuances like the in-memory representation of a 5-bit integer weren't documented, so you had to experiment to find out the exact behavior if you were doing anything "interesting"), once you've picked it up it really is a simple language. IMO it's worth pushing through. I've done hardly anything with Go yet, but Zig fits happily in the mind of this particular C/Rust/Forth/Scala/Python/... programmer. Pushing through the first ~100 Ziglings exercises might be a pretty fast way to work through most of the syntactic differences if you're already comfortable with C and Rust.

Or maybe your prior is that new languages need to prove themselves and stabilize a little longer before you sink time into them. That's fine too. I'm just commenting since you seem to be a bit on the fence and because I think it's better than your current impression of it is.

[binary132]

I stan Zig but the OP literally starts with “there was a subtle bug in my fork() wrapper for years”.

[voidhorse]

My experience is exactly the same. It deviates just enough in really minor ways that it becomes difficult to write. There's a lot of upfront effort to unlearn all the syntactic patterns that have already been established, the fact that the differences are really small makes it harder, not easier.

I think the language design includes a lot of good justification for these choices, but I worry they might have underestimated the sheer power of habit and historical precedence.

[wredue]

Personally, I do not find that zig differs from other languages all that greatly.

I am actually a little curious about the minor and subtle differences, cause I personally did not find that this was the case coming from C, Java, C#, a little rust, COBOL and NATURAL.

Edit:

I do admit that you need to understand what said other languages are doing in order to accomplish things. No hidden flow definitely increases a bit of the surface area of the code, but if you understood how other languages accomplish the stuff they hide form you, then zig does not feel like it has minor differences.

[anacrolix]

This is my impression too. Rust is drastically different from mainstream languages, so it's worth the jump. Zig is quite close, and I'm not sure it provides enough. I would just use C.

[wredue]

0.12 is meant to be the version that you can probably stop tracking master.

It isn’t stable, but it is.

[mr90210]

> I really hope Zig becomes stable soon so I can use it on non-throwaway projects

This may or may not give you some comfort, but I recall hearing one of the core maintainers of Zig talking about its use at Amazon to leverage its cross platform capabilities.