[ikskuh]

> Zig is harder to learn than C with more difficult concepts.

I'm using Zig and C for a good amount of time now and i disagree. Zig has simpler concepts as C, but in C you can just ignore them.

Consider

   char buf[4];
   float * f = buf;
   *f = 32;

Seems simple, compiles, and even executes. Everyone is happy. But that code will just explode randomly on non-x86 platforms as it violates alignment rules. In Zig, this code will give you a compile error, as []u8 does have alignment 1, while a []f32 will have alignment 4. This means you have to learn about alignment before accidently writing code that will randomly crash at runtime depending on the stack position of buf.

And Zig has a lot of these things that require implicit knowledge in C as explicit knowledge implemented in the language itself. Same goes for integer casting, shifting more than sizeof() bits, and so on.

It moves the footguns from the code to the user, and so the user has to learn about all of these concepts before writing Zig code. In C, the code will silently compile and misbehave at runtime. This might feel like additional complexity in a lot of places, but the complexity is there in both languages. One just makes it explicit.

But this is obviously not true for all things in Zig. comptime is a whole new feature that wasn't seen in a lot of languages before and afaik not as it is used in Zig, so it's something new to learn even if you already can do perfect C. The same goes for more precise data types (struct vs extern struct) and so on.

One hard footgun in Zig right now is implicit aliasing of parameter types, which sometimes get passed as a reference and sometimes as a value. This is a known footgun is already on the table to be adressed by better semantics and more safety guards

For me, writing Zig feels way less complex than C because a lot of brain load that went into writing correct C was offloaded to the compiler, which is good. But it also increases the friction when writing code as the compiler forces you to think about alignment and such.