I am waiting for (near) 1.0 myself before doing anything major with it. But that’s mainly because I want at least the async IO stuff to be settled for my use cases.
Nowadays when you can just point an agent at release notes and have it update everything, I actually prefer not having to wait through rare major releases to get new language features.
Except that means that not only you lose compiler bugfixes, you also pretty much has no access to the ecosystem. For most production codebases, this is a deal breaker.
That sounds like it's not ready for production to me.
To me it is not much different from Lua, which despite being on 5.x for decades, makes breaking changes on minor releases (because it predates SemVer).
I also don’t see it being much different from any other language or language runtime that has a major release every year.
It’s fine to update at your own pace.
I did, and I immediately found this in the latest release: https://ziglang.org/download/0.16.0/release-notes.html#IO-as...
That seems like it would require changing a lot of code. Calling it "production ready" is dishonest at best
If by production-ready you mean you can forever avoid changing code you wrote 8 months ago, sure, pick something else.
To me production-ready means it can be trusted to power production workloads, has all tooling I need, and has a consistent long-term vision. Zig ticks all the boxes.
This is a solved problem in other projects. Either use the version numbers as intended and bump the major version number on breaking changes, or use Rust-style editions to opt in to the newer versions of the changes.
Calling a project production-ready but keeping the version number below 1.0 and saying breaking changes are expected is a tired game. We've seen it backfire across a number of language projects like Elm, where the exact same claim was used to both encourage people to use it and then blame them when it backfired.
If it's production ready, go to 1.0 and then follow semver for breaking changes. I don't care if we get to Zig v73.2.0 as a result. At least we can see from a glance which versions need to be checked for breaking changes.
on the other hand, a language with frequent breaking changes should not be considered production ready.
people are of course free to live on the edge, and if someone decided that zig is good enough and they are not bothered by breaking changes then they are free to use it for their production system, but that doesn't mean it's ready for everyone. so i prefer the zig approach.
I disagree MIGHTILY. This is how you wind up with C++ and Java.
Languages need to be able to remove features to stay coherent. Occasionally, you get things wrong, it takes time to figure that out, and that's just the way life is.
Why are we so obsessed with updating dependencies, and at the same time, not willing to put in the work to update our own code?
The result of Zig’s approach is that the ecosystem of packages is very active, quickly updating to use the latest language features, and with a good foundation of tests that catch regressions.
because i want to benefit from the improvements/bug fixes in the dependencies, whereas updating my own code does not bring any improvements (unless it is taking advantage of a new feature in the dependencies) and for a large project can be very expensive.
more practically for my work, i need to be able to compile my application with a compiler that is actively supported, but i have no budget to rewrite old code just because the compiler developers decided to break old functionality.