I just upgraded some code to Zig 0.16.0 and I am actually really happy with the results. It impacted A LOT of things, but the changes were actually very good and seems to have set the language for a bright future, especially with the new IO mechanism which allows supper efficient code that looks good whether it's implemented single-threaded, multi-threaded or just via an event loop!
If you haven't tried Zig since 0.16.0 was released, I highly recommend having a look. The release notes for this release were huge!!
the “(super) efficient” is not there yet. Io is still dynamic dispatch with multiple layers of indirection. afaik it’s slower than before.
the upcoming releases are expected to provide a solution to this “dispatch still dynamic, even though comptime-known” problem, and bring back the losses in efficiency.
portly 3 hours ago [-]
After having used Zig for a couple of months now I am convinced it is a fantastic tool language. You just pick it up to hack some idea together freely. Every time I hit a wall, I find the creators have thought of it already and offers comfort. But nothing gets in your face how to use the programming language "correctly".
For me it is now the go-to "tinker in my garage" language.
ACCount37 2 hours ago [-]
Is it really that good?
My go-to "tinker in my garage" language is Python - lightweight syntax that stays out of your face, batteries included, packages for everything that's not included. What's Zig's edge?
flossly 2 minutes ago [-]
You both like different types of tinkering.
Some people put a generator on a tesla cybertruck and call that garage tinkering.
Some people make a go-cart out of a lawnmower and call that garage tinkering.
The first is the "batteries included Python" tinkering, the second is the "low level Zig" tinkering.
dmit 2 hours ago [-]
Have you ever thought "Ugh, this bit of Python code is running much slower than I expected on my computer. Wonder if anyone has written a native library for this"? That's probably the closest use case for someone who matches your description -- a language that is much more ergonomic, much more 'modern' feeling (in all the good ways), while still extremely compatible with C.
As for the language itself, it's going to be more verbose than your Python code. Cons: you'll have to spell out a lot of things that you thought were obvious assumptions. Pros: you will be able to look at a page of code and know with a great degree of certainty that there are no hidden gotchas. No monkey patching, no __init__. Basically, it just does what it says on the tin.
And finally, about the std lib and batteries: there's HTTP(S), compression algorithms, hash algorithms, RNG, I/O, the basic data structures you'd expect, JSON. Third-party libraries, if you choose not to vendor, are handled by including the repository url in a file (also automated by a CLI command), and then adding it to the build script (not automated). The `zig` command handles fetching and ensuring sanity, but otherwise assume a bit of elbow grease will need to be involved.
ACCount37 2 hours ago [-]
Rarely. Most tinkering tasks just don't have enough heavy duty computation in them to as much as strain a modern CPU. And most of the rest are covered by packages like numpy or pytorch.
For the rare exceptions, I make a C lib and call into it to get my numbers crunched. I get that Zig is a viable replacement for C there. But I don't see it replacing Python.
p-e-w 2 hours ago [-]
Not to mention that where heavy computation is required, Python often has libraries that are much, much faster than anything you can quickly hack together in C or Zig.
maleldil 1 hours ago [-]
As long as you can express everything you need on the library's terms. As soon as you write a Python loop, your performance plummets.
bluecalm 15 minutes ago [-]
Only if you doing something thousands of people has done before.
Anything new, even very simple and you are on your own and Python is 100x slower than naive C implementation on many tasks.
Last little project I remember is writing a solver for a puzzle game my friend published. Python just doesn't work at all for such tasks.
I think you are wrong about speed of those libraries as well. In my experience naive code designed for a specific task beats highly sophisticated general code and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to get huge speed-ups over some well established fast library.
miki123211 1 hours ago [-]
And if you really need more performance (or, more often, fast startup times), Go gives you 90% of the speed with 30% of the effort. Rust if you really want to squeeze everything that can possibly be squeezed of that CPU.
norman784 2 hours ago [-]
Zig is low level, so it will certainly not replace your python usage, it is more like a modern C than anything else. There’s a video of a recent interview with Andrew Kelley, if you want to watch it to understand better what Zig is for, it’s on Jetbrains YouTube channel.
ACCount37 2 hours ago [-]
No, I get that, but Zig being low level is kind of why I don't get why it would be a good tinkering language?
When I want to tinker, I just want my logic to work, first of all. In 9 cases out of 10 that means going for high level. Even if the resulting code works with low level things like binary structures.
mcdonje 2 hours ago [-]
You have a weirdly restrictive definition of "tinker"
andyferris 2 hours ago [-]
Low-level programming gets a bad name because C has many footguns and the spec leaves much behavior undefined - a fact that implementers use almost adversarially (which I'd support, if the goal was to refine the spec...).
C++ adds more high-level conveniences without actually removing the footguns and undefined behavior (much C code compiles in a C++ compiler).
Zig tries to keep the low-level C philosophy but have things more well factored and well defined. The result is you _can_ tinker in high-level code, yet "drop down" into low-level code as you desire.
(Compared to rust, you get fewer compiler-enforced guarantees, but unlike C the language isn't trying to make high-level code adversarial).
jcul 42 minutes ago [-]
It made me laugh to think of C implementers being adversarial! It can feel that way.
I haven't really used modern C, not sure if it's evolved as much as modern C++, which I feel is a joy to use, and a lot safer. But then I've been writing C++ for decades.
I feel like C evolved from basically syntax sugar for assembly, so that's where all the footguns come from, rather than being actually adversarial.
robinsonb5 5 minutes ago [-]
If some of the things that the C standard left undefined had instead been made implementation defined then the compiler would at least be obligated to do something that makes sense on the target architecture, rather than having license to take the lawful-evil route. (Plenty of architectures have addressable RAM at location zero, for instance.)
For some reason this always brings to mind that moment in Red Dwarf where Kryten, devoid of his behavioural chip, deems it appropriate to serve roast human to his crewmates. "If you eat chicken, obviously you'd eat your own species as well, otherwise you'd just be picking on the chickens!"
uecker 7 minutes ago [-]
Both C and C++ compilers (in fact, they share this part) very aggressively exploited undefined behavior for performance. But I this was certainly not adversarial. Programmers also regularity picked optimizations over safety. I think nowadays the unsafety of C with modern tooling vs the safety of - say - Rust is very much exaggerated.
pjmlp 1 hours ago [-]
Basically what the world has lost by ignoring Modula-2 and Object Pascal, and going down the C path.
2 hours ago [-]
1 hours ago [-]
brabel 1 hours ago [-]
Tinkering means different things to different people! Want to tinker with your hardware, as bare metal as possible? Or extract every inch of performance out of your CPU? Zig is great for that.
miki123211 1 hours ago [-]
And not only that, if you're doing something in Python, somebody has done it before. Maybe not this exact thing, but something close enough to it. LLMs know it, Stackoverflow knows it, whatever esoteric protocol or file format you're trying to interact with, somebody wrote a library for it in the Python 2 days and has ironed out all the bugs since.
There's no other language quite like Python in this regard. Typescript is a close second, but the lack of metaprogramming facilities, no access to the type annotations at runtime, and the lack of operator overloading make some things needlessly complicated and uglier than they have any right to be.
dtj1123 42 minutes ago [-]
The only language I've historically been able to claim to know without feeling like I'm straight up lying has been Python, and having got past my first maybe 1000 lines of Zig I can say pretty confidently that whatever magic makes Python feel comfortable to write, Zig has too.
It requires more of you in some ways, notably that you have to understand the basics of memory management and the behaviour of the stack, but so far I've found the affordances that the language provides for handling this stuff feel very intuitive.
The only sharp edges I've felt so far have been the sometimes hard to guess locations of things in the standard library, and the permenant anxiety that arises from knowing I'm going to be a few more versions behind the current release with every month that passes.
portly 2 hours ago [-]
I like that you have more freedom. You can play around with some idea but once you want to do something "serious" you can break into it directly. I start simple but sometimes blip into some performance obsession and I find Zig allows that.
samuell 30 minutes ago [-]
My main issue with this is I expect Mojo to become the go to tinkering language for me.
asibahi 2 hours ago [-]
It’s definitely a great tinkering language but .. eh .. the Zig team and community are extremely opinionated about how to use the language correctly.
I think bun is moving to rust because Anthropic owns it and the devs there like rust. So why would they invest in another implementation? Sad to see a good zig example go, but as soon as Anthropic bought it I wrote the project off.
pylotlight 5 minutes ago [-]
Just plain incorrect.. please stop spouting this nonsense, this is not the reason whatsoever.
amazingamazing 4 minutes ago [-]
What is the reason?
xorgun 41 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
kristoff_it 4 minutes ago [-]
Bun has de-facto refused to use incremental compilation in Zig for ages. It got to the point where Jarred somehow seems to have forgotten that the feature exists.
In any case Bun has already committed to the Rust slop switch, so it doesn't matter anymore.
ulbu 41 minutes ago [-]
bun seems to be committed to slop rust already. so, with their ethic, maybe we should just disassociate them from zig and let them go realize their slop dreams?
zig is on its way to improving compilation times in its own pace and does so for the benefit of the project and everyone involved, so what is left to care for about bun by anthropic’s past?
epolanski 3 hours ago [-]
This sounds like great news, Zig's compilation times are already terrific and this is going to only make them better.
pjmlp 1 hours ago [-]
Yes, compilation speeds of the 90's are slowly making a return, thankfully.
dmit 3 hours ago [-]
> Zig's compilation times are already terrific
In my experience, this (for now) is mostly aspirational. It's obviously a major goal, and there are clear milestones outlined on how to achieve it, but in practice the initial compile of an empty project or the excruciating pause when you `direnv allow` and ZLS needs to be (re)built are not what I'd describe as "terrific".
schaefer 2 hours ago [-]
>(re)built are not what I'd describe as "terrific".
It sounds like you are a strong candidate to try out the new improvements mentioned in this devlog and see what benefits you can get for yourself.
epolanski 3 hours ago [-]
Maybe you're right, but how many other system programming languages toolchains give you sub 50ms recompilations across millions of LoC?
dmit 2 hours ago [-]
I foresee a pjmlp comment in your near future. :)
epolanski 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah, let's add a sprinkle of toxicity to my Saturday morning!
nromiun 29 minutes ago [-]
Is there any proposed timeline for a stable release? Big features like the recent async IO shows the language is very unstable right now.
xydone 2 minutes ago [-]
There is no ETA on 1.0, but breakage has followed the pattern of it not really being hard to upgrade to a newer version, as it is very well documented on the version release notes.
bluecalm 4 minutes ago [-]
Andrew's take is "it's ready when it's ready but we hope it's good enough before it's fully ready that you want to use it anyway".
It's different and I like it. You get one shot at it and may just as well get it right in as many areas as possible.
IshKebab 31 minutes ago [-]
Zig has so many compelling features, and I'd even be willing to give up Rust's near-perfect memory safety in some cases. But the one thing that really put me off is string handling. It's just so super tedious. I like being able to finely manage individual string memory allocations, but I really don't want to have to do it all the time. RAII is great; I wish they'd use some light (optional) RAII for strings and containers etc.
steveharing1 2 hours ago [-]
So i checked the license of this project, can anyone pls clarify what is (Expat) after MIT License
papercrane 1 hours ago [-]
There are a number of licenses that are named MIT that are all similar, but not identical.
The "Expat" here is the MIT license variant. It is referring to the Expat XML parsing library that first used this license.
Usually when projects these days use an MIT license this is the version they use.
maleldil 1 hours ago [-]
There are different licenses that used to be referred to as "MIT", and explicitly stating "Expat" tells you which one they're referring to (in this case, the "standard" one). This is largely unnecessary, as nearly all mentions of the MIT license refer to this one.
abhayji 3 hours ago [-]
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abhayji 3 hours ago [-]
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baskduf 4 hours ago [-]
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lerp-io 3 hours ago [-]
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KingMob 2 hours ago [-]
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alkyon 2 hours ago [-]
Carpentry would have been ideal career. Building real things, artisanal or not, and nobody insisting yet that the chest of drawers you're building include AI
KingMob 2 hours ago [-]
Of course, the flip side is, modern construction isn't done with artisanal woodworking techniques.
I'm not even thinking of AI, but Rust. I guess I'm just uninterested in a "modern C".
Rendered at 13:03:41 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
If you haven't tried Zig since 0.16.0 was released, I highly recommend having a look. The release notes for this release were huge!!
https://ziglang.org/download/0.16.0/release-notes.html
the upcoming releases are expected to provide a solution to this “dispatch still dynamic, even though comptime-known” problem, and bring back the losses in efficiency.
For me it is now the go-to "tinker in my garage" language.
My go-to "tinker in my garage" language is Python - lightweight syntax that stays out of your face, batteries included, packages for everything that's not included. What's Zig's edge?
Some people put a generator on a tesla cybertruck and call that garage tinkering.
Some people make a go-cart out of a lawnmower and call that garage tinkering.
The first is the "batteries included Python" tinkering, the second is the "low level Zig" tinkering.
As for the language itself, it's going to be more verbose than your Python code. Cons: you'll have to spell out a lot of things that you thought were obvious assumptions. Pros: you will be able to look at a page of code and know with a great degree of certainty that there are no hidden gotchas. No monkey patching, no __init__. Basically, it just does what it says on the tin.
And finally, about the std lib and batteries: there's HTTP(S), compression algorithms, hash algorithms, RNG, I/O, the basic data structures you'd expect, JSON. Third-party libraries, if you choose not to vendor, are handled by including the repository url in a file (also automated by a CLI command), and then adding it to the build script (not automated). The `zig` command handles fetching and ensuring sanity, but otherwise assume a bit of elbow grease will need to be involved.
For the rare exceptions, I make a C lib and call into it to get my numbers crunched. I get that Zig is a viable replacement for C there. But I don't see it replacing Python.
Last little project I remember is writing a solver for a puzzle game my friend published. Python just doesn't work at all for such tasks.
I think you are wrong about speed of those libraries as well. In my experience naive code designed for a specific task beats highly sophisticated general code and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to get huge speed-ups over some well established fast library.
When I want to tinker, I just want my logic to work, first of all. In 9 cases out of 10 that means going for high level. Even if the resulting code works with low level things like binary structures.
C++ adds more high-level conveniences without actually removing the footguns and undefined behavior (much C code compiles in a C++ compiler).
Zig tries to keep the low-level C philosophy but have things more well factored and well defined. The result is you _can_ tinker in high-level code, yet "drop down" into low-level code as you desire.
(Compared to rust, you get fewer compiler-enforced guarantees, but unlike C the language isn't trying to make high-level code adversarial).
I haven't really used modern C, not sure if it's evolved as much as modern C++, which I feel is a joy to use, and a lot safer. But then I've been writing C++ for decades.
I feel like C evolved from basically syntax sugar for assembly, so that's where all the footguns come from, rather than being actually adversarial.
For some reason this always brings to mind that moment in Red Dwarf where Kryten, devoid of his behavioural chip, deems it appropriate to serve roast human to his crewmates. "If you eat chicken, obviously you'd eat your own species as well, otherwise you'd just be picking on the chickens!"
There's no other language quite like Python in this regard. Typescript is a close second, but the lack of metaprogramming facilities, no access to the type annotations at runtime, and the lack of operator overloading make some things needlessly complicated and uglier than they have any right to be.
It requires more of you in some ways, notably that you have to understand the basics of memory management and the behaviour of the stack, but so far I've found the affordances that the language provides for handling this stuff feel very intuitive.
The only sharp edges I've felt so far have been the sometimes hard to guess locations of things in the standard library, and the permenant anxiety that arises from knowing I'm going to be a few more versions behind the current release with every month that passes.
https://ziggit.dev/t/bun-s-zig-fork-got-4x-faster-compilatio...
In any case Bun has already committed to the Rust slop switch, so it doesn't matter anymore.
zig is on its way to improving compilation times in its own pace and does so for the benefit of the project and everyone involved, so what is left to care for about bun by anthropic’s past?
In my experience, this (for now) is mostly aspirational. It's obviously a major goal, and there are clear milestones outlined on how to achieve it, but in practice the initial compile of an empty project or the excruciating pause when you `direnv allow` and ZLS needs to be (re)built are not what I'd describe as "terrific".
It sounds like you are a strong candidate to try out the new improvements mentioned in this devlog and see what benefits you can get for yourself.
It's different and I like it. You get one shot at it and may just as well get it right in as many areas as possible.
The "Expat" here is the MIT license variant. It is referring to the Expat XML parsing library that first used this license.
Usually when projects these days use an MIT license this is the version they use.
I'm not even thinking of AI, but Rust. I guess I'm just uninterested in a "modern C".