I/O, Linked, Incremental Compilation. Apart from 0.17 being a short release cycle. I wonder how many more releases before 1.0?
Are we looking at 0.20, another one and half year of baking?
Are we looking at 0.20, another one and half year of baking?
An argument could be made that why it's taking so long is about the language's BDFL wanting the freedom to continually make breaking changes. As it is, they got another bewildering pass for sweeping 3,000 plus issues under the rug, with the move from GitHub to Codeberg.
No one's been giving passes bewildering or otherwise for sweeping issues under the rug, because that didn't happen. The 0.16 release notes are linking to plenty of GitHub issues. If you have additional information to post on an issue then you can copy it to Codeberg: https://codeberg.org/ziglang/zig/issues/30027
Just being ambitious isn’t necessarily good. Look at Perl6.
Or you end up like NIM which they are on 3rd or 4th version already.
And frankly speaking, a lot of people took to Wiki and said it has been 10 years, in reality Andrew only started working on it full time in 2018, and had a year off due to other personal issues, and then COVID hit. Together It is more like 6 years than 10.
If you instead look at the over 500 kloc of the Zig source compared to the 70 kloc of the Odin one, it’s a bit clearer why the delay happened: the goals of Zig kept expanding.
But not only that: ”juicy main” and Io is something that could have been in Zig from the early days and yet it isn’t. In the Io case it’s Zig pivoting from ”we have colorless async!” to no async, to Io.
In other words, Andrew is still experimenting with the language (and more is to come, like ranged integers). This is not the signs of a maturing language, it a language still very much in flux, trying to find its form.
The contrast to Odin is that for the last 2-3 years it has had minimal syntax tweaks, and is essentially in release candidate mode for the language.
Even if Zig didn’t need more changes, it would still need that stabilization period.
This tells us Zig is still rather far from 1.0.
I wonder what Andrew is thinking about all this.