[cturtle]

I’ve absolutely had satisfaction with my several personal projects written in Zig. And based on an imperfect measurement (GitHub stars) I have also had moderate success in making something useful. It’s a terminal fuzzy finder [0]. I also maintain a Zig Lua bindings package [1], and I’m working on a port of an old Macintosh game [2].

Zig is exactly what I want out of a language though, so take my opinion with a grain of salt :)

[0]: https://github.com/natecraddock/zf

[1]: https://github.com/natecraddock/ziglua

[2]: https://github.com/natecraddock/open-reckless-drivin

[andrewstuart]

>> Zig is exactly what I want out of a language though

What is exactly what you want from a language?

[cturtle]

I value simplicity and control.

Zig is a very consistent language in syntax and semantics, so there are a small number of features I need to be concerned with. My understanding is that once Zig reaches a stable 1.0 the language will not change. Although there is a lot of churn right now, I appreciate the idea of a language that is simple, and stays simple.

The code is also very readable. I haven't found another language (yet) that I can just open up the standard library source code and understand just about everything. With no hidden control flow I can easily read a function and not have to question what a line of code does. Everything it does is right in front of me.

I also love that Zig is trying to fix many of C's problems. Rather than a global libc allocator, each function that can allocate (by convention) accepts an allocator as an argument. In my projects this has been really great for understanding what code paths allocate, which has made it easy to package my fuzzy finder as an allocation-free Zig module and C library.

Now, if I were working on a project with more critical safety requirements, I might consider a different language. But for most of my personal projects Zig is exactly what I need.