People see the languages/libraries they use as their sellable articles. And why wouldn’t they? Every job application begins with a vetting of which “tools” you can operate. A language, as a tool, necessarily seeks to grow its applicability, as securing the ROI of if its users.
And even when not tied to direct monetary incentives, it can still be tied to one’s ability to participate and influence the direction of various open source efforts.
Mix in barely informed decision makers, seeking to treat those engineers as interchangeable assets, and the admirable position being promoted above falls down the priority chain.
> You don't need to treat it like an identity.
This is an eternal problem in this industry and it is by far the most annoying thing about it.
It's another language stack that would need to be maintained within Linux distributions for years to come (security support, architecture support etc).
Upstream developers always seem to assume that there is no cost associated to introducing new software stacks. But in the end, someone has to maintain it. And they keep forgetting the purpose of software is to serve users, not developers.
And I'm not sure what's so revolutionary about Zig that couldn't have been solved by improving other languages.
For Zig in particular, the language isn't even stable enough that you can compile packages like Ghostty with any recent version of the Zig compiler. It has to be a very specific version of the compiler.
Personally I'm glad that there are more people trying to break out of the C tar pit. Even if I'd never chose to use the language.
Developers are the users of these software stacks though? I don't really understand your point.
I don't have any horse in the game, but I do think Zig is interesting. This remark is funny to me because it's literally one of the tenets the Zig devs make decisions by!
https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/#Zen
> * Together we serve the users.
So what is your point?
> Why do people "worry" about Zig potentially never becoming mainstream?
There are people who want to learn Zig because they're excited to gradually transition their way away from some other ecosystem, and into the Zig ecosystem, as the Zig ecosystem takes root and develops.
But they don't want to regret that decision. They don't want to end up in a place where they're writing blog posts about how much they love Zig, and are the maintainer of five popular Zig libraries, and yet still feel forced to use C++ for their next actual app project (where they're then mostly unable to make use of those Zig libraries!) just because Zig, not being sufficiently "mainstream", can't attract/force the corporate owners of big fat libraries (Vulkan, CUDA, LLVM, etc) to invest effort into integrating with it, and continuously maintaining those integrations for it (i.e. including a Zig build in their CI matrix, so that their upstream changes can't silently break that integration.)
And if the new software stack just improves a fraction of the ecosystem, it isn't worth the effort.