alt Hacker NewsTo each his own, but while I can certainly understand the hesitancy of an architect to pick Zig for a project that is projected to hit 100k+ lines of code, I really think you're missing out. There is a business case to using Zig today.
True in general but in the cloud especially, saving server resources can make a significant impact on the bottom line. There are not nearly enough performance engineers who understand how to take inefficient systems and make improvements to move towards theoretical maximum efficiency. When the system is written in an inefficient language like Python or Node, fundamentally, you have no choice but to start to move the hotpath behind FFI and drop down to a systems language. At that point your choices are basically C, C++, Rust, or Zig. Of the four choices, Zig today is already simplest to learn, with fewer footguns, easier to work with, easier to read and write, and easier to test. And you're not going to write 100k LOC of optimized hotpath code. And when you understand the cost savings involved in reducing your compute needs by sometimes more than 90% by getting the hotpath optimized, you understand that there is very much indeed a business case to learning Zig today.
Replies
>with fewer footguns, easier to work with, easier to read and write, and easier to test.
With the exception of fewer foot guns, which Rust definitely takes the cake and Zig is up in second, I'd say Zig is in last place in all of these. This really screams that you aren't aware of C/C++ testing/tooling ecosystem.
I say this as a fan of Zig, by the way.
> ...in the cloud especially, saving server resources can make a significant impact on the bottom line. There are not nearly enough performance engineers who understand how to take inefficient systems and make improvements to move towards theoretical maximum efficiency.
That's a very good point, actually. However...
> with fewer footguns
..the Crab People[0] would definitely quibble with that particular claim of yours.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_People of course.
> Of the four choices, Zig today is already simplest to learn,
Yes, with almost complete lack of documentation and learning materials it is definitely the easiest language to learn.
As a counter argument to this. I was able to replicate the subset of zig that I wanted, using c23. And in the end I have absolute stability unless I break things to “improve”.
Personally, it is a huge pain to rewrite things and update dependencies because the code I am depending on is moving out from under me. I also found this to be a big problem in Rust.
And another huge upside is you have access to best of everything. As an example, I am heavily using fuzz testing and I can very easily use honggfuzz which is the best fuzzer according to all research I could find, and also according to my experience so far.
From this perspective, it doesn’t make sense to use zig over c for professional work. If I am writing a lot of code then I don’t want to rewrite it. If am writing a very small amount of code with no dependencies, then it doesn’t matter what I use and this is the only case where I think zig might make sense.