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Comment by ubavic | Hacker News Reader

I’ve written software for a living in JS, C, Pascal, and Go, and I’ve tried many, many more languages. After working on a project in Zig for a year, I’m convinced that Zig is the best-designed language I’ve tried so far. Haskell comes close. At least, it’s the best-designed language for humans.

It’s not for everyone yet. It’s still unstable, and its ecosystem is small. However, both are improving.

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Zig couldn't be further away from Haskell in features and community culture.

I'd like to learn more about the connection between Zig and Haskell as they seem almost opposite in design and philosophy. I'm pretty sure you just meant they're both "good languages" but if there are parallels I'm missing I'd love to know!

I'm not the person you asked, but I see them both as languages that try to get a lot of mileage out of a few features. Both of them try to have small cores, instead of taking a "maximalist" approach like C++.

> It’s not for everyone yet. It’s still unstable, and its ecosystem is small. However, both are improving.

To be fair, I've heard this for years now, yet the hype keeps mounting. I wasted half an hour this morning debugging a broken Zig project, all because I used a release a few months too new that removed some options used in build.zig

Releasing stable software and caring about backward compatibility is a skill many open-source maintainers don't ever want to engage with. It's so easy saying "our code is not stable, if it breaks good luck to you", but at some point it starts to smell like fear of commitment to running a serious project that people depend on.

Why such high expectations from a 0.x project? They explicitly break backwards compatibility now so they don't have to do it once 1.0 comes. There's nothing wrong with waiting a few years before trying Zig.

My point is that at some point one needs to recognize their project is used for production stuff and make stability the focus, rather than hiding behind the 0.x excuse for years. Call it the Peter Pan syndrome of open source.

For comparison, Elixir started in 2012, and got its 1.0 in 2014, two years later. Zig stable has been ‘a few years’ for literally a decade.

I mean. Zig is a really freaking good language for LLMs (in my hands) too

What LLM? I used claude and it just cracks up on zig 0.16. Terrible.

Claude. I have several things written in zig:

- wasm lalign utility (integrated in opengenepool.vidalalabs.com, not obvious how to trigger it but you can inspect the wasm package)

- real-time DNA gel lane assignment

- proprietary (Claude also used zig to reverse engineer the usb wire protocol) industrial camera driver

Last two:

https://x.com/DNAutics/status/2099583335940936175?s=20

If you want weirder shit:

https://github.com/ityonemo/2b4m

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