"No hidden control flow" is completely orthogonal to "no implicit typing". I think anyone looking at Zig would immediately recognize that it is firmly in the type inference camp by choice.
As far as simplicity, I think their pitch is "simpler than Rust", not in absolute terms. The whole comptime thing is hardly simple in general.
I am not a big Zig aficionado but I definitely contrast it in my mind moreso with C and C++ rather than Rust. It definitely aims at being a “better C” sort of language moreso than a “better C++” which Rust seems to be focusing on.
Better than that would be a language that doesn't require / almost compel users (by "almost compel", I mean the user community, obviously, not the language literally, since it is not sentient) to use an IDE in order to use the language, and using which (language) you can still do what you said above, by just using a text editor.
In the same vein as what you said here about orthogonality ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42097347 ), programming languages and IDEs should be orthogonal (and actually are, unless deliberately linked). People were using languages much before IDEs existed. And they got a hell of a lot done using the primitive surrounding tools that existed back then, including, you know, gems like Lisp and the concepts embodied in it, many of which have, much later, been adopted by many modern languages.
And I still meant "almost compel", even by the community, because of course they cannot really compel you. I meant it in the sense of, for example, so many people using VS Code for programming posts.
> Better than that would be a language that doesn't require / almost compel users (by "almost compel", I mean the user community, obviously, not the language literally, since it is not sentient) to use an IDE in order to use the language, and using which (language) you can still do what you said above, by just using a text editor.
It's ironic that you complain about this because Zig is probably the most "normal editor" friendly programming language for exactly the kind of thing mentioned in the article.
I don't need an IDE to figure out the 12 options to that function and fill them out with the correct defaults. I don't have to hunt through 23 layers of mysterious header files to find the declaration I need to figure everything out. etc.
Just try figuring out a foo(12).bar(14).baz("HELP!").fixme("ARRGH!") construction chain in C++ or Rust without an IDE. Oof.
1) Zig doesn't encourage those and 2) in Zig I can trace the @import() calls and actually run "grep" on things.
>It's ironic that you complain about this because Zig is probably the most "normal editor" friendly programming language for exactly the kind of thing mentioned in the article.
echo Who complained, $(echo bsder | sed 's/sd/ro/') ? ;)
Not me. Don't put words into my mouth.
(I don't care if I got the above shell syntax wrong), this was just a quickie, for fun ;)
you seem to have misunderstood my words, in the exact opposite way from what I meant. congrats. not!
>I don't need an IDE
who told you that I needed an IDE?
chill, willya?
and, wow:
>to figure out the 12 options to that function and fill them out with the correct defaults. I don't have to hunt through 23 layers of mysterious header files to find the declaration I need to figure everything out. etc.
12 and 23, exaggerating much? we are not talking about win32 API functions, podner.
>Just try figuring out a foo(12).bar(14).baz("HELP!").fixme("ARRGH!") construction chain in C++ or Rust without an IDE. Oof.
Don't resort to theatrics or histrionics to make your point (like HELP! and ARRGH!), (I am allowed to, tho, because i > u :)
>1) Zig doesn't encourage those and 2) in Zig I can trace the @import() calls and actually run "grep" on things.
faaakkk!
though a bsder, you find header files mysterious, and cannot grep through them, if they are in C++ or Rust, eh? are find and xargs your enemies? or even just ls - R | grep
?
stopped editing, even though there might be a few minor typos.
Zig does not have an IDE, but it does have a language server called zls[0] that I have found to be pretty decent after implementing Loris' suggestion from this post[1].
But that kind of shortcut seems to be optional.