[Raphael_Amiard]

I love systems programming language and have worked on the Ada language for a long time. I find Zig to be incredibly underwhelming. Absolutely nothing about it is new or novel, the closest being comptime which is not actually new.

Also highly subjective but the syntax hurts my eyes.

So I’m kind of interested by an answer to the question this articles fails to answer. Why do you guys find Zig so cool ?

[audunw]

It’s hard to do something that is truly novel these days. Though I’d argue that Zigs upcoming approach to Async IO is indeed novel on its own. I haven’t seen anything like it in an imperative language.

What’s important is the integration of various ideas, and the nuances of their implementation. Walter Bright brings up D comptime in every Zig post. I’ve used D. Yet I find Zigs comptime to be more useful and innovative in its implementation details. It’s conceptually simpler yet - to me - better.

You mention Ada. I’ve only dabbled with it, so correct me if I’m wrong, but it doesn’t have anything as powerful as Zigs comptime? I think people get excited about not just the ideas themselves, but the combination and integration of the ideas.

In the end I think it’s also subjective. A lot of people like the syntax and combination of features that Zig provides. I can’t point to one singular thing that makes me excited about Zig

[norir]

Scala did async io in a very similar way over a decade ago except it was far more ergonomic, in my opinion, because the IO object was implicit. I am not convinced by either scala or zig that it is the best approach.

[uecker]

As someone who still thinks one should write C (so as a completely uncool person), what I like about Zig is that it is no-nonsense language that just makes everything work as it is supposed to be without unnecessary complications, D is similar, except that it fell into the trap of adding to many features.

So, no, I do not really see anything fundamentally new either. But to me this is the appealing part. Syntax is ok (at least compared to Rust or C++).

Having said this, I am still skeptical about comptime for various reasons.

[vendiddy]

We've recently adopted Zig at a few systems at our company but I think maybe "cool" or "new" is the wrong metric?

I view Zig as a better C, though that might be subjective.

[pjmlp]

It gets hyped by a few SV influencers.