[rvrb]

Zig is famously simple to pick up and write with, so I don't know what you mean by "difficult". Software is dangerous. Memory safety is one of a million ways it can be dangerous. A compiler barfing when it thinks you are doing something unsafe with pointers is one approach to dealing with one of the ways that code can be dangerous to execute.

Zig does not ignore that particular danger, it just takes a different approach to dealing with it than some other modern languages. An approach that, I believe, leaves the developer with a little more humanity by allowing them the benefit of the doubt that they know what they are doing.

Everyone that has not built a systems language, or has not built a real application with both Zig and a memory safe language, that is reacting emotionally to what I've said should put a lot of consideration into whether they are cargo culting or using critical thought. Consider that we still do not yet know what is best, and shutting down attempts to explore different ideas with things like "creating [and using] this language is ignoring the humanity of the end user" is, well.. dumb.

[James_K]

>Zig is famously simple to pick up and write with, so I don't know what you mean by "difficult".

It's easy to get in a car and put your foot on the pedal, but usage entails not crashing.

>Memory safety is one of a million ways it can be dangerous.

We have the statistics on this. It is 7 out of 10 ways it is dangerous, going by proportion of CVEs, so it's likely higher in less well tested software. Your estimation was off by 5 orders of magnitude.

>leaves the developer with a little more humanity

I could care less if the developer is afforded humanity. I want to write software and I want a programming language that helps me to do that. Whatever humanity I'm sacrificing by writing in memory safe languages is more than made up for by the comparative ease of not having to worry about memory safety.

>reacting emotionally

You are reacting emotionally. You are judging programming languages by their emotional value rather than their features. “Humanity” is not a measurable feature. 70% fewer CVEs is a measurable feature.

[lerno]

I have never heard anyone calling Zig "famously simple" before. In fact, people tend to say it has quite the learning curve.

Of course, caveats apply: it is certainly simple compared to some languages, but certainly not compared to others. "Famously simple" seems to indicate it is one of the simplest languages to learn, which seems wrong unless there are some serious qualifications to that statement?

[rvrb]

C, C++, Rust, Zig. Rust and C++ have an infamous learning curve. If you know anything about using any systems language other than Zig, Zig is incredibly simple to pick up, like C. Unlike C, it pushes you toward making less mistakes.

If you don't know anything about using a systems language, Zig makes it easier for the people who do to review your code and make sure you didn't mess it up. It does this with very intentional design that makes it easier to understand the full impact of code quickly, reducing the cost of review, making review practical to catch the issues. It also has many other fail safes to catch these problems before they ever reach a production release.

So, yeah, it's totally depending on where you are coming from -- but Zig is not a tool built for a web developer who doesn't know anything about memory to go and ship an application within their first week. It does make it easier for that person to learn the ropes at a steady pace.

Meanwhile, everyone complaining that Zig is not memory safe doesn't seem to care that applications written in Zig do not have the vulnerabilities that memory safety solves on the scale that C does[0].

If you have not written a real application in Zig and evaluated it for vulnerabilities, but are claiming that creating Zig was irresponsible, and using it is too; you are cargo culting.

If you have, you probably understand there is a niche that Zig fits in and that it isn't surprising it exists to fill it. Like all things in our industry, there is a cost/benefit analysis required for choosing the tools you build with.

No one reasonable has claimed that memory safe languages should not exist, but there is a maddening number of people being disrespectful toward those who think there are other ways of addressing the same problems.

[0]: https://mitchellh.com/writing/ghostty-gtk-rewrite

[lerno]

If you are comparing Zig to Rust and C++, which are very well known to be difficult to learn, then that is not really saying anything about the ease of learning it. Compare it to Swift, D or Odin. Is it "incredibly simple" compared to those languages as well?

Similarly, one can claim that pretty much anything compiles "incredibly fast" if one compares with Rust, C++ and Swift.

But comparing to worst in class doesn't actually say anything.

One note about this:

> If you have not written a real application in Zig and evaluated it for vulnerabilities, but are claiming that creating Zig was irresponsible, and using it is too; you are cargo culting.

I don't know what this has to do with my comments at all, but I want to point out that you are using "cargo culting" wrong. This describes imitating practices of something successful, thinking that by this imitation, success will follow as well.

> No one reasonable has claimed that memory safe languages should not exist,

Again, I have not talked anything about whether memory safe languages should or should not exist. You are confusing me with someone else.

[baranul]

Marketing speak, that looks to be trying to put Zig over languages like Golang, Vlang, etc... which are well known for their simplicity and readability. The false hype arguably creates confusion, that Zig can be "all things to all people", when it's not.