Improving your Zig language server experience | Hacker News Reader

Improving your Zig language server experience

kristoff.it

83 pointskristoff_it4 comments

I have seen Bun use Zig and they're showing some interesting performance gains. I'm unsure if it's because the code runs faster, or because it's easier to write better code.

Either way, it got me interested in Zig.

How's the developer ecosystem feeling these days, the community, and what have you all developed with it that was fun to develop but also cool to see it working?

I think zig generally gives you more options than other languages. The idea of having to bring your own allocator for every function that might allocate is great idea not only from the perspective where you can choose the most efficient allocation strategy, but also because it makes you conscious about the cost of the function immediately.

Zig is very productive language and feels like the true evolution of C to me.

There are a lot of changes happening each release and the results of those changes are often not well documented. For instance, these days most Zig projects include this "build.zig.zon" file, but if you look for any info on the website, you'll find nothing [1][1b]. The build system in general is a bit hard to grok and not very well documented imho.

The developers are very open about Zig's immaturity [2]. I feel like keeping up with Zig it still requires a lot of hanging out on chat rooms and forums, finding "the right blog post", and digging into the source code.

1: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22build.zig.zon%22+site%3Az...

1b: I guess the release notes of 0.11 are the best documentation for zuild.zig.zon right now? Although you would expect to see that better documented elsewhere.

2: https://ziglang.org/download/0.13.0/release-notes.html#This-...

Fan. fucking. tastic.

It's not often I consider investing in a project just because I think the key actors will keep doing the right things. Zig is a notable exception. By and large, it looks like they're making the right decisions at the right times, and I sincerely hope they can keep up the momentum.

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