[randypewick]

My question was genuine: what makes the Zig devs apart from the others, according to the question op?

Arguably, there are important things that Zig devs are doing which are not "Zig dev made" (hence the "giants" I mentioned). NASA 10 rules are now rebranded as "tiger style" and marketed along Zig; Data Oriented Design existed before Zig; LLVM existed before Zig; the authors of gpui, the library that seems to have inspired gooey, apparently did a pretty great job (please correct me if I'm wrong, I don't do graphics, don't use gpui, this is what I understood when gpui came out).

I'm sure Zig devs made pretty great things, too! Does Zig make them apart? Do Zig attracts more capable devs than other languages, maybe? Genuine question!

[Validark]

I take issue with the statement that "tiger style" is marketed along with Zig. Tiger Style is neither convention nor standard, it's not on ziglang.org, it's not referenced by the Zig Core Team as the end all be all. At present I don't recall them ever referencing it, but I'm sure they have talked about it somewhere.

On the subject of Data-oriented design, it's mostly just the default way of thinking about software in most contexts. The DoD movement is not so much building on predecessors as it is ignoring predecessors who tell us to use OOP and "clean code" for everything.

LLVM is the part of Zig that breaks the most, it's the slowest part of the compiler by leaps and bounds, and takes the most time of the core team to fix the constant breakages it introduces. I'm glad it exists obviously, to some extent, but I wouldn't praise it for much more than its widespread appeal and ease of "adding another pass" compared to GCC and having more of a company-friendly license. It could have been designed a lot better and could be managed very differently and we'd see better results.

GPUI - I bet it's great. I guess I just tend to dislike phrasing like "stand on the shoulders of giants" because I tend to think the best thing hasn't been built yet. "Real engineering has never been tried!" I agree though that an AI port of a Rust library to Zig is probably not what any of us consider the holy grail of engineering.

In short, I think Zig and TigerBeetle and the Handmade Ethos exist not primarily because others paved the way, but because others went astray. Andrew Kelley used to argue with people online about how cross-compilation should be easy for systems languages and got hit by the excuse parade every time. Eventually he decided to quit his day job and solve it himself. Is that standing on the shoulders of giants? I don't think so. Yes, he has technically picked up where others left off, but he's picking up on abject failures and fixing them.

Now there is good engineering within LLVM and Clang, and good developers have done good work on it. I'm not saying everyone who worked on it is stupid or did bad work. However, there are glaring issues at a macro level and organizational level that individual contributors can't fix.