alt Hacker NewsThere is an idea I've been kicking around for a long time, which I'll just call dual programming. The idea is to develop a stack that consists of just two programming languages, 1 higher level language, and one lower level language. You are supposed to do as much programming as you can in the high level language, and only drop into the low level language as needed. The problem is that unless you already know a low level programming language really well, you'll most likely have to re familiarize yourself with the language before doing the low level stuff.
This makes Cpp and Rust harder to use then say C, so C becomes the default for me. But C is not without its issues of which we are aware. But Zig feels like it could fill that sweet spot really well, being simple enough that it's easier to pick up after a long break, but still coming with a lot of modern tooling that makes programming easier.
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The OG of these is probably C and Assembly. C and (Emacs) Lisp is well known. Arguably, it's the entire reason we have Python. But if you want to pair Zig against something, I would look at Lua.
C# is close to achieving that goal.
> You are supposed to do as much programming as you can in the high level language, and only drop into the low level language as needed.
I think that's a neat idea, but in the reverse: do as much as you can in the lower level language, and only go up to the high level language when the convenience is worth the cost.
Roc allows this: every program has a platform written in a low-level language, and then the Roc program uses the API that the platform exposes.
https://www.roc-lang.org/
Then how you want to balance high vs low is of course up to you :^)