Are people just really excited about this project? Are the people behind it just really good at marketing?
Honest question: why do we all keep talking about Zig?
- Uber uses Zig to produce hermetic builds of their backends and was able to move their C/C++ codebases to arm64 thanks to Zig's C/C++ cross-compilation support.
https://www.uber.com/en-US/blog/bootstrapping-ubers-infrastr...
- Bun is written in Zig and its sudden success was big enough to cause Deno to have an identity crisis.
- TigerBeetle is written in Zig and it's probably the most promising upcoming database company out there.
- There are a few more notable examples, but I haven't been given permission to talk about them publicly yet.
> Honest question: why do we all keep talking about Zig? > Are the people behind it just really good at marketing?
The project is simply inherently interesting. For one reason or another, nobody figured out a proper build & cross-compilation experience for C/C++ before Zig did it, just like nobody has figured out a good package manager yet for C/C++ and we're about to do it.
When Apple Silicon came out Zig was the first compiler able to cross-compile for it (way before LLVM btw) thanks to our custom linker, and thanks to it and the fact that we're working on our own custom backends, we're also going to achieve incremental compilation with in-place binary patching, ultimately reducing linking time to basically zero for incremental rebuilds.
Zig is also the only language that has async/await but that doesn't have an ugly & wasteful split between blocking and evented versions of the same networking library.
I'm stopping here with technical arguments, but there would be more to talk about.
Lastly and most importantly, the project has an interesting approach to finances and governance: we've had a non-profit foundation for longer than Rust and we have made a point to never, ever, let big tech companies influence the governance of Zig.
The Zig Software Foundation pays its developers (instead of hiring copywriters & marketing people) and 90+% of what we make through donations or support contracts goes to developers. The rest is infrastructure and administrative costs (eg CI, accountant).
I'm the guy who's most in charge of marketing and I'm currently working on the automated documentation system because Zig pretty much markets itself.
VP of Community strikes again.
We do embedded development for medical devices, and zig fits perfectly because we can use static allocators and have all the features of the language.
It works very well, we write firmware for STM32 serie of chips.
We can compile the same code to WASM and run it into a simulator, it works great for us.
Seems totally insane to me to use a pre-1.0 application written in a pre-1.0 language in production considering Node and Deno basically do the same thing.
I'd be very happy to hear I am wrong about this and see a profitable company with an established product using it.
Is there a problem with this? If you have a problem to solve and nobody's telling you you have to use certain tools to solve it, why not try a new tool yourself and see if it solves it better than the old ones? I do this whenever I can on client projects and I've found some rather pleasant tools this way.
As for who's using Bun in production, I don't know. But it's been around for a while and seems to have decent buzz around it in the JS community when observed from a safe distance (the proper way to observe the JS community), so I assume someone is. Take that for what it's worth.
The one most people jump to from the past few years is Rust and/or Go, but we've experienced this with other languages like Lisp (& variants), Haskell, Scala had a small window, etc. Zig will no doubt have its own moment like this (if it's not already), and then the hype cycle will settle into wherever Zig is used best.
Think of it like a magnifying lens on overall programmer sentiment/interest.
But they are boring; nerds like shiny new objects.