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Comment by Ygg2 | Hacker News Reader

This depends on what you mean by low level. Commonly it means, how much you need to take care about minute, low-level issues. In that way C, Rust, and Zig are about the same.

Dependencies have nothing to do with low-level vs. high-level but just package management, how well the language composes, and how rich the standard library is. Are assumptions in package A able to affect package B. In C that's almost impossible to avoid, because different people have different ideas about how long their objects live.

Having a rich standard library isn't just a pure positive. More code means more maintenance.

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I agree with you that package management has nothing to do with how low-level a language is.

That being said Rust is definitely a much higher level language than either C or Zig. The availability of `Arc` and `Box`, the existence and reliance on `drop`, and all of `async` are things that just wouldn't exist in Zig and allow Rust programmers to think at higher levels of abstraction when it comes to memory management.

> Having a rich standard library isn't just a pure positive. More code means more maintenance.

I would argue it's much worse to rely on packages that are not in the standard library since its harder to gain trust on maintenance and quality of the code you rely on. I do agree that more code is almost always just more of a burden though.

> That being said Rust is definitely a much higher level language than either C or Zig. The availability of `Arc` and `Box`, the existence and reliance on `drop`

I mean, C++ have RAII and stuff like unique pointer, does that make it higher level than Zig?

And what if you don't use Arc or Box? Is your program now lower level than baseline Rust?

As I said, depends a lot about what you mean by low level.

It depends on the facilities the language offers to you by default right?

C++ offers much higher level primitives out of the box compared to Zig, so I'd say its a higher level language. Of course you can ignore all the features of C++ and just write C, but that's not why people are picking the language.

IMO "level" roughly corresponds to the amount of runtime control flow hidden by abstractions. Zig is famous for having almost no hidden runtime control flow, this appears pretty "low level" to many. OTOH, Zig can have highly non-trivial hidden compile time control flow thanks to comptime reflection, but hardly anyone identifies Zig as a "high level" metaprogramming language.

I'd say so. Zig is aiming to be a bit smarter than C while staying at roughly the same level. C++ more sought/seeks to support C but offer higher level things with it.

I feel like Zig is to C what Rust is to C++, kind of.

And in practice the maintenance just doesn't get done. That's why Python's "rich standard library" with batteries included not only periodically has to throw out "dead batteries" because parts of its stdlib are now obsolete, but also has an ecosystem where good Python programmers don't use parts of the stdlib "everybody knows" just aren't good enough.

You see that in C++ too. The provided hash tables aren't good enough so "everybody knows" to use replacements, the provided regular expression features aren't good enough, there's the 1970s linear algebra library that somebody decided must be part of your stdlib, here's somebody's "my first optimized string buffer" type named string...

For now Zig is young enough that all the bitrot can be excused as "Don't worry, we'll tidy that up before 1.0" but don't rely on that becoming a reality.

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