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Comment by gzread | Hacker News Reader

Wow! What a mind-bogglingly stupid idea. I will cancel my plans to learn Zig.

My excitement for Zig dropped the longer they stayed at 0.x (and they really have meant 0.x with the breaking changes they were making). This decision from them completely killed it for me.

I understood not using the C Runtime and instead creating direct wrappers over the Win32 API, but going a level lower to APIs that are not guaranteed to be stable is nutty.

ntdll.dll APIs are guaranteed to be stable though

The best statement of whether or not calling functions in ntdll is here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/k...

> documentation for the WDK and Windows SDK recommends that application developers avoid calling undocumented Nt entry points

So it's safe to call documented ntdll functions. But calling undocumented functions is more risky.

Part of this was the allowed or special treatment given to Zig at certain sites. It then allowed the false impression to be created of it being production ready and/or far more stable than it actually is. Often intentionally overlooking or glossing over that it's still in beta, making breaking changes, and has thousands of issues (over 3,000 on GitHub).

They were allowed to have it both ways, pre-1.0 and yet somehow (near, like, just about) production-ready. Almost there, for years. Strangely given a free pass to get away with this, for what looked to be undisclosed financial and other fuzzy reasons.

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