Ziglang – robust, optimal, and maintainable programming language | Hacker News Reader

Ziglang – robust, optimal, and maintainable programming language

github.com

44 pointsrodmena15 comments

> Performance and Safety: Choose Two

How does Zig manages its memory ? I couldn't find any info on a garbage collector, so I assume the memory isn't dynamically-managed.

If it's statically managed, how is it done ? I it using some kind of region-based checking, like Rust with its borrow-checker ? Or is it 100% in the hands of the programmer ? (In which case, the «safety» argument is a bit strange).

It's 100% manual[1]; that "safety" you're quoting is not referring to memory safety.

[1] https://ziglang.org/#Manual-memory-management

memory safety is in fact planned, check out the GitHub issue links at the end of the safety section for more information. I'm excited about those plans - in my opinion it will make zig a real competitor to Rust in particular. Until then rust has the upper hand for the memory safety use case.

https://ziglang.org/#Manual-memory-management

Zig has a number of useful constructs such as sum types, compile-time introspection, improved error handling and no preprocessor!

It's great that people are interested in this, but the topic itself has had significant attention in the past year, which is the criterion we use for dupes (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19811183

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19610199

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Zig%20points%3E30&sort=byDate&...

Interested to hear what folks see as the major markets for Zig...

EDIT: By markets I meant application categories, e.g. OS kernel, firmware, embedded, etc.

I'd already gathered that its closest competitors are C and Rust.

It's a systems programming language described as a replacement for C, this blog post shows how to incrementally replace C with Zig in your codebase: http://tiehuis.github.io/blog/zig1.html

The single-page documentation is here: https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/

It seems like it would be attractive if you want a systems language that's much more modern than C (and comes with build and testing systems) but you're not interested in Rust's borrow-checker.

As I understand it is meant to have merge lots of modern improvements but keep the (positive parts of the) feeling of C.

Replacement for C (not C++) as a low-level systems programming language.

(C++ and other language programmers often conflate C with C++, but the two are really different languages.)

What does Zig offer over something like Rust?

https://github.com/ziglang/zig/wiki/Why-Zig-When-There-is-Al...

Zig truly is a better C, glad to see it getting so much attention around these parts

What do you mean by "optimal?" You mean runtime performance?

It means you can't write bad code in it. When you write something, the code will compile the best way it can behave.

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