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Comment by the_duke | Hacker News Reader

> and possibly the first radical breakthrough in low-level programming design in decades

Can you expand what you mean here?

I really like Zig, and there is definitely a big design space to explore in creating a modern low-level language that doesn't come with the complexity of something like Ada/Spark or Rust.

This binary patching + daemonized compiler approach is particularly exciting.

But as a language, I'm not aware of any features that would amount to a "radical breakthrough". As far as I am aware, it is a modernized, low level language, with nice compile time evaluation, async, and some runtime-provided safety guarantees. But nothing that is so novel from a type system / language design point of view.

Happy to be corrected though!

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> creating a better C

I'm not sure I like the "better C" label. After all, Zig allows you to easily do stuff that's virtually impossible in C, and only possible in C++ with templates and constexprs and concepts. It also doesn't have pointer arithmetic and pervasive wild casts, so it's not a "syntax-sugared Assembly". Its only similarity to C is that it is a low-level language and that, unlike other low-level languages that aren't C -- like C++, Rust, and Ada -- not only is it not among the most complex languages in the history of software (all three of those have probably secured their places in the top-five), but it is probably among the simplest.

> I'm not aware of any features that would amount to a "radical breakthrough". As far as I am aware, it is a modernized C, with nice compile time evaluation, async, and some runtime-provided safety guarantees. But nothing that is novel from a type system / language design point of view.

AFAIK, general partial evaluation with introspection as a single mechanism to do the work of generics, typeclasses/traits/concepts, value templates, macros, and conditional compilation -- combined with a general error reporting mechanism that is shared between runtime and compile-time -- has never been attempted before. It is revolutionary.

> I'm not sure I like the "better C" label.

I agree that Zig is more than a "better C", and I edited my comment.

Regarding `comptime`: I haven't fully grokked it, but it looks very similar to the capabilities of D (and in part Nim). Do you by chance know those languages and can give a comparison?

(Languages like Idris also allow to express a lot at compile time, but that's quite a different domain)

Nim and D have a similar feature, but Zig's radical design is not in including this feature but in not including others it can replace (generics and macros). Both D and Nim have generics as a separate features, and Nim has macros and D has conditional compilation as a separate features. Zig is not special in having comptime; it's special in having only comptime as the single partial-evaluation mechanism.

Are you sure that minimalism is a design principle of Zig's, and not just the current state of the project? @andrewrk's comments at https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/130 lead me to believe that it's still undecided.

(To be clear, I don't use Zig, yet.)

Yes, I am sure it's a design principle. Which is not to say that some aspects will change. E.g. I'm in favour of some of the (more minimal) suggestions here: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/1669

> ... has never been attempted before. It is revolutionary.

Have you seen http://terralang.org/

Someone pointed it out to me a while ago. I don't think the approach is comparable to Zig, but is in a somewhat similar spirit. Like with macros, Terra contains two languages (one of them being the meta language), while Zig has general partial evaluation in just one language (also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24293611). For example, in Terra, conditional compilation is a branch in the metalanguage; in Zig, it's just a branch in Zig that is partially evaluated.

BTW, even Zig's build language is just Zig!

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