[Decabytes]

There is an idea I've been kicking around for a long time, which I'll just call dual programming. The idea is to develop a stack that consists of just two programming languages, 1 higher level language, and one lower level language. You are supposed to do as much programming as you can in the high level language, and only drop into the low level language as needed. The problem is that unless you already know a low level programming language really well, you'll most likely have to re familiarize yourself with the language before doing the low level stuff.

This makes Cpp and Rust harder to use then say C, so C becomes the default for me. But C is not without its issues of which we are aware. But Zig feels like it could fill that sweet spot really well, being simple enough that it's easier to pick up after a long break, but still coming with a lot of modern tooling that makes programming easier.

[kristoff_it]

> You are supposed to do as much programming as you can in the high level language, and only drop into the low level language as needed.

I think that's a neat idea, but in the reverse: do as much as you can in the lower level language, and only go up to the high level language when the convenience is worth the cost.

Roc allows this: every program has a platform written in a low-level language, and then the Roc program uses the API that the platform exposes.

https://www.roc-lang.org/

Then how you want to balance high vs low is of course up to you :^)

[sunsetSamurai]

roc lang looks very interesting, I see they use a lot of Zig and Rust, very unusual combo I think.

[latexr]

I think they are switching from Rust to Zig. I don’t recall exactly, but they talked about it in a video where the creator of Roc interviewed the creator of Zig.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w74rC-6caxE

[sunsetSamurai]

thanks, will watch it later

[childintime]

C# is close to achieving that goal.

[SvenL]

People always laugh when I mention C# in this regard. It has so many things, like pointer, you can define that memory alignment works like in C, SIMD, AoT compilation, Span<T>. I think you can do pretty much C like programming in C#.

[pjmlp]

We had several of such languages in the 2000's. C# is basically becoming what Modula-3 already offered.

[satvikpendem]

Or just use one language that does both high level and low level programming well, such as Rust. I use it for everything now as I haven't found anything it can't do yet, especially with its OCaml like type system.

[BariumBlue]

A common combo for this is (was?) C and Lua. Lua is intended to be a embedded language, so good for Interop, but also also high level and easy to use.

There's a reason why Factorio uses Lua as it's scripting level language

[tl]

The OG of these is probably C and Assembly. C and (Emacs) Lisp is well known. Arguably, it's the entire reason we have Python. But if you want to pair Zig against something, I would look at Lua.

[dnautics]

this was the general motivation for my project zigler:

https://github.com/E-xyza/zigler

[Decabytes]

Very cool use of Elixir! I have been considering the Fig Stack (F# + Zig) myself, so I'm excited to see Zig being paired with a Functional Language

[wodenokoto]

I believe that is how SpaCy is developed. Models are implemented in Cython and user facing API in Python.

[frail_figure]

Neovim comes to mind. It uses clang as the core, and luajit as the extension layer on top.

[addaon]

Objective-C and C?