Comment by kristoff_it | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kristoff_it | Hacker News Reader

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Some people like Zig because it makes it easier to learn how to program the machine sitting in front of them.

It's better at that than Rust because it's less abstracted, and it's better at that than C because you don't have to worry all the toolchain nonsense / weird conventions / weak type system of the C ecosystem.

As a small example wrt Rust: resetting an arraylist/vector while reusing its memory is a weirdly complicated trick https://lobste.rs/s/emvkea/why_we_didn_t_rewrite_our_feed_ha...

I think I don't need to provide references for C.

It's a new pathway to mastery that really works well for some people. That in itself is much more valuable than any new specific feature the language has to offer, although the ability of the toolchain to cross-compile reliably not only Zig but also C and C++ code does play into that.

And, while not yet 100% there, instant incremental rebuilds also help to achieve faster feedback loops.

People like Zig because it's a tool that helps them become better programmers, faster.

> As a small example wrt Rust: resetting an arraylist/vector while reusing its memory is a weirdly complicated trick

A bit of a nitpick here: the trick is for creating a new vector of a different type, that reuses the allocation of an existing vector, using only safe code. "Resetting an arraylist/vector while reusing its memory" is just vec.clear() if you're not changing the type. And it's trivial to change the type of a vector with unsafe (the docs even have examples of this); the only advantage of the "trick" is to ensure you'll get a panic if you screw up the alignment of the types.

And after that blog post, the Rust team accepted a proposal to introduce a vec.recycle() function to change the type of a vector without needing that trick (and with compile-time checks for alignment compatibility): https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/148416

But that example aside, I agree with your overall premise -- Zig and Rust share different design goals here, and Zig's lower level of abstraction makes it more approachable to learn than a language like Rust.

> As a small example wrt Rust: resetting an arraylist/vector while reusing its memory is a weirdly complicated trick https://lobste.rs/s/emvkea/why_we_didn_t_rewrite_our_feed_ha...

Nitpicking? Let’s show an example on creating an interface in Zig to see all complicated tricks.

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