alt Hacker NewsAgreed unfortunately, if Zigs whole selling point is meant to be a "nicer C" (and a much nicer DX than Rust because no fighting the borrow checker etc) - does that really matter in a world where an LLM is writing the code? I am not going to be fighting the borrow checker, the LLM is.
And as always, the response you'll hear is: but AI sucks/hallucinates/could never replace me etc... Just look at the progress LLM'S have made in the past few years, and extrapolate that to the next 10 or 20 years. I don't see how Zig makes sense if this is the trajectory the industry is going.
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Why would *any* programming language matter when LLMs can just directly output binaries from a sufficiently detailed spec ;)
And specifically, why would Rust be a better choice than C or Zig when the LLMs get good enough to just write memory safe code in unsafe languages (they are already pretty good at finding memory safety bugs).
IMHO for code generation, different things start to matter (like fast build times, while 'convenient highlevel abstractions' become less important).
Why's everybody obsessed with the popularity contest?
Rust is a great language with some great killer features.
It does not need consistent propaganda preaching how it's a better choice than "insert other language".
Every system programmer is aware of Rust and it's pros. Doesn't mean it's a language that fits the use case, project, constraints and even preferences. It's not just about generating code, it's also about reading it and maintaining it.
Thus some people just prefer alternatives, be it C, C3, Odin, Zig, Jai or whatever else there is.
You said it yourself, it's selling point is "nicer C", so it's for people that don't want to write Rust or C++ but a nicer C.
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> Just look at the progress LLM'S have made in the past few years, and extrapolate that to the next 10 or 20 years.
First of all, past trend doesn't predict the future.
And if it did, then the answer would be nothing will matter in 20 years. Not just "no programming language," but nothing.