[drdexebtjl]

Zig is not pre-1.0 because it’s not ready for production (bugs or missing features), it’s pre-1.0 because they want to be able to make breaking language changes.

Nowadays when you can just point an agent at release notes and have it update everything, I actually prefer not having to wait through rare major releases to get new language features.

[afdbcreid]

> Nowadays when you can just point an agent at release notes and have it update everything

Except that means that not only you lose compiler bugfixes, you also pretty much has no access to the ecosystem. For most production codebases, this is a deal breaker.

[rwz]

> they want to be able to make breaking language changes

That sounds like it's not ready for production to me.

[drdexebtjl]

I invite you to read the release notes and see for yourself the types of breaking changes we’re talking about.

To me it is not much different from Lua, which despite being on 5.x for decades, makes breaking changes on minor releases (because it predates SemVer).

I also don’t see it being much different from any other language or language runtime that has a major release every year.

It’s fine to update at your own pace.

[uaksom]

> I invite you to read the release notes and see for yourself the types of breaking changes we’re talking about.

I did, and I immediately found this in the latest release: https://ziglang.org/download/0.16.0/release-notes.html#IO-as...

That seems like it would require changing a lot of code. Calling it "production ready" is dishonest at best

[drdexebtjl]

Not really. It’s find and replace work.

If by production-ready you mean you can forever avoid changing code you wrote 8 months ago, sure, pick something else.

To me production-ready means it can be trusted to power production workloads, has all tooling I need, and has a consistent long-term vision. Zig ticks all the boxes.

[uaksom]

Changing core features every few months doesn't seem very consistent...

[Aurornis]

> Zig is not pre-1.0 because it’s not ready for production (bugs or missing features), it’s pre-1.0 because they want to be able to make breaking language changes.

This is a solved problem in other projects. Either use the version numbers as intended and bump the major version number on breaking changes, or use Rust-style editions to opt in to the newer versions of the changes.

Calling a project production-ready but keeping the version number below 1.0 and saying breaking changes are expected is a tired game. We've seen it backfire across a number of language projects like Elm, where the exact same claim was used to both encourage people to use it and then blame them when it backfired.

If it's production ready, go to 1.0 and then follow semver for breaking changes. I don't care if we get to Zig v73.2.0 as a result. At least we can see from a glance which versions need to be checked for breaking changes.

[em-bee]

languages ideally should not have breaking changes ever.

on the other hand, a language with frequent breaking changes should not be considered production ready.

people are of course free to live on the edge, and if someone decided that zig is good enough and they are not bothered by breaking changes then they are free to use it for their production system, but that doesn't mean it's ready for everyone. so i prefer the zig approach.

[bsder]

> languages ideally should not have breaking changes ever.

I disagree MIGHTILY. This is how you wind up with C++ and Java.

Languages need to be able to remove features to stay coherent. Occasionally, you get things wrong, it takes time to figure that out, and that's just the way life is.

[em-bee]

i'd like to add, there are many things that can be criticized on C++ or java. but language stability is not one of them. in fact i believe language stability is one of the things that keeps both languages an ongoing success.

[em-bee]

different preferences i guess. i much prefer language stability. the idea that i should have to test my code with every python version out there for example is disturbing, but there are tools to do exactly that. they should not be needed.

[maleldil]

The solution to this is editions/epochs, like Rust. You can set your project to the 2025 edition and be sure that, even if future versions introduce breaking changes, they will not affect your project; it will continue to compile as before.

[drdexebtjl]

You can continue to compile as before by using a previous version of the Zig compiler. You even get a 100% byte-for-byte match with reproducible builds.

Why are we so obsessed with updating dependencies, and at the same time, not willing to put in the work to update our own code?

The result of Zig’s approach is that the ecosystem of packages is very active, quickly updating to use the latest language features, and with a good foundation of tests that catch regressions.

[em-bee]

pike has that. or had it. for two decades. inline in the code, in each file you could specify the version. they decided to drop it because of the maintenance overhead.