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Comment by aDyslecticCrow | Hacker News Reader

Ai is great at block comments, there is no excuse. Add to that a small anotated usage example written by a human and this whole post would have not existed.

Lack of docs also cripple AI from understanding, so future adoption becomes even more bleak.

If an api or library developer didnt bother doing even bare minimum docs, my confidence in the library drops aswell.

Did they skip testing aswell? Ran the happy path for a day and called it good?

This post sour my interest in zig. Its now obvious to me now why rust took much of its market.

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There's also a fundamental difference in Zig and Rust. Ever tried reading std code in Rust? If you have, you would notice one thing really quick: it's borderline unreadable. It's a hornet's nest of Generics over constraint generics calling into indirections.

Of course, this isn't meant to be a defense for the lack of documentation on Zig's side, but in my experience, Zig's code definetly is much easier to read, just because for the fact, that Rust's std code is akin to C++'s stl.

One of the personal grimes i have with Zig is, that `anytype` makes the function contract kind of meaningless, because you can't see what is expected purely on the function definition.

Zig is just getting started and came way after rust.

I like Zig, but if we look at the numbers, the difference is probably more to do with funding that anything:

Zig (programming language) - First appeared 8 February 2016; 9 years ago

Rust (programming language) - First appeared January 19, 2012; 13 years ago

Also, Zig at this point isn't really a brand new language anymore. I have comments on their issues dating back to 2018, so it's been a very active language since at least then.

Those are not comparable dates. The Zig "first appeared" date is a few months into development by Andrew in his spare time. The Rust "first appeared" date is after 3 years of development by Graydon in his spare time, followed by 3 years of development by a Mozilla-sponsored team of engineers.

So they're gonna just finnish up their standard lib and THEN spend a year doing nothing but docs for everything they made?

Just getting started is an even bigger reason to have good docs to clearly communicate how the libraries and APIs work!

I wouldn't even read a push request containing a new function if the creator didn't bother writing a short description and usage clarification.

Getting started is a good excuse for limited libraries or support (same situationwith rust). But lack of even basic docs is not acceptable if you want user adoption.

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