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Comment by p-e-w | Hacker News Reader

> I think the Zig people are really just concerned that maybe Zig itself is a DOA language because it doesn't offer enough over C for any serious use and their flagship project has now abandoned it.

You hit the nail on the head there. Zig is 10 years old now and it’s pretty clear that the industry isn’t biting, compared to the behemoth that is Rust. Between Rust, C, and C++ there is very little room for another language with a woefully incomplete library ecosystem to establish itself.

A true competitor would need to offer genuine extra value, such as dependent types or other formal verification features, to carve out a niche.

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There is also the fact of newer "closer to C" alternatives like C3[1] and Zen C[2], or more intriguing C family alternatives such as Odin[3], Jai[4], or Vlang[5].

Zig is kind of trapped. It can't go "head to head" with heavy weights like Rust, who specialize in safety, are more mature (post 1.0), and have lots of corporate support. Then there are the other C alternatives, who each offer something it doesn't have.

It appears the only way for it to maintain its position, is through heavy hype and marketing, but the whole Bun ordeal and extensive beta issues are subtracting from any such attempts.

[1]: https://c3-lang.org/

[2]: https://github.com/zenc-lang/zenc

[3]: https://learnxinyminutes.com/odin

[4]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdpD5QIVOKQ

[5]: https://codefreelance.net/apps/vlang.html

The industry isn't biting @ Zig because it's unstable, notoriously difficult to integrate new changes into an existing codebase and because the compiler is a bitch to develop with (hard error on unused variables with no way to turn it off).

Go has that same problem/feature

Yes, sadly.

Not sure that last one rings true. There are entire languages with no allowed unused variables (some without prepending a _ to the names) that people love to develop with.

In the industry, how often is it that a tool/language is picked up for the ease of developing that tool, vs ease of using that tool?

> it’s pretty clear that the industry isn’t biting

Zig isn't finished yet (they still have not released a v1.0). They're still iterating on the language itself and want the flexibility to make backwards-incompatible changes while they do so.

So in a sense, they have not yet asked anybody in mainstream industry to "bite." After v1.0, when there's an understanding of stability and ongoing language support, industry adoption or lack thereof might become a relevant metric for measuring the project's health. But right now that's not relevant at all.

I hear you, but Zig is also 10 years old now. While the authors may not want to signal they're ready, people make assumptions based on age regardless.

Either users think (a) it's actually ready after a decade, since many langs/libs are conservative with jumping to v1.0, or (b) they'll think it's [a toy/a side project/run by perfectionists] that's not ready for production, and might never be.

This isn't exactly fair for those who want to just take tir

This. I talked about Zig to my company CTO for embedded systems, he told me he was happy that someone mentioned it as he finds it promising and not much talked about, especially compared to Rust.

He then told me that it is, as you said, unfinished, and that he can't reasonably recommend it for embedded projects that are often long term and demand stability. C, a 1970 language is still king for a reason! So he is keeping Zig on his watchlist for when it becomes more mature.

> A true competitor would need to offer genuine extra value, such as dependent types or other formal verification features, to carve out a niche.

believe it or not it is generally easy to do this with zig with few modifications (WIP), and the team has said publically that they will be making this sort of thing a supported operation once the IR stabilizes post-1.0.

https://github.com/ityonemo/clr/

This is just a dumb take, hardly any language is immediately popular. Python, Ruby, etc. were still pretty niche 10 years in. Pretty much every popular language is 15+ years old.

Python was invented two years before Java and didn’t move the needle until the mid 2010s.

You are the typical mark for hype cycles. Get a clue will you.

Python was being used as a teaching language at flagship universities in the mid 2000s.

Amazing! So was Scheme.

> Python ... didn’t move the needle until the mid 2010s.

Nope. I was on a Python project in 2006 and earned a paycheck doing so.

I was getting paid doing django in 2005-2006

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