What I find incredible about these takes is that they’re so removed from reality. It’s quite unfortunate how difficult it is to get a lot of programmers to evaluate things from the shoes of others.
I have firsthand experience trying to get fellow C programmers to try Zig (and Rust too), and it’s already extremely difficult as is. The three things that have helped me sell Zig has been the combination of (1) how easy it is to get up and running with it (no prerequisites or installs necessary) [0], (2) the C interop story (which was a selling point for me [1]), and (3) the very simple yet impressive and complete build process [0].
What’s interesting is that you call my point risible when, based on your response, it’s clear to me you don’t understand the audience we’re talking about.
For example, you say:
> […] because they have to copy-paste a build.zig gist to get started […]
Professional C programmers generally favor actually understanding what’s happening under the hood, so unlike, e.g., JavaScript or Python developers, suggesting they get started by copying and pasting build code they don’t understand is a nonstarter for a lot of C programmers. And understanding Zig’s build system doesn’t happen as quickly [1] as being able to use Zig directly. Even after writing a decent amount of Zig build code, I’ve had to, on a number of occasions, go read the Zig build system code to understand how something is implemented (e.g., how it deals with certain paths, peculiarities of the dependency system, caching semantics, etc.)—if I had to figure out the build system before I was able to get started with Zig and be productive, I would’ve never taken it seriously.
There’s a reason why Zig has been marketed as a compiler that can also serve as a drop-in replacement for GCC/Clang. What you’re effectively saying is that this main selling point doesn’t matter even though that’s been one of the main things that makes Zig attractive to C programmers. Incredible.