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by stephc_int13 5 days ago
Lindy effect is very strong in the programming languages world.

Zig is a very interesting and well built language, but it is also niche, unstable and not offering radical improvements over C.

C, as the foundation of all modern kernels and system tools, among many other things, is extremely unlikely to go away soon.

Everything you do in Zig can be done almost in the same way in C or C++.

I would say the real value of Zig is in the standard library that is more modern and arguably better.

1 comments

> Everything you do in Zig can be done almost in the same way in C or C++.

Can you do this in C?

https://github.com/ityonemo/clr

Linters are not exactly a new idea, and they can be pushed quite far.

I am generally against the idea of language support for meta-programming, even using C macros or C++ templates.

I do a lot of meta-programming/codegen with external tooling.

> Linters are not exactly a new idea, and they can be pushed quite far.

That's not an answer. There's a reason why you can't do it in C, and the reason is "the stdlib is poorly designed". No amount of linting can get you around that.

I agree about the C stdlib being outdated and the worst part of C. This is why I don't use it.

A new modern C standard library would be a very good thing. But I am ok writing my own, tailored for my own needs and style.