What I've discovered is that while it does regularize some of the syntax of C, the really noticeable thing about Zig is that it feels like C with all the stuff I (and everyone else) always end up building on my own built into the language: various allocators, error types, some basic safety guardrails, and so forth.
You can get clever with it if you want -- comptime is very, very powerful -- but it doesn't have strong opinions about how clever you should be. And as with C, you end up using most of the language most of the time.
I don't know if this is the actual criterion for feature inclusion and exclusion among the Zig devs, but it feels something like "Is this in C, or do C hackers regularly create this because C doesn't have it?" Allocators? Yes. Error unions? Yes. Pattern matching facilities? Not so much. ADTs? Uh, maybe really stupid ones? Generics, eh . . . sometimes people hack that together when it feels really necessary, but mostly they don't.
Something like this, it seems to me, results in features Zig has, features Zig will never have, and features that are enabled by comptime. And it's keeping the language small, elegant, and practical. I'm a big time C fan, and I love it.
I am fast becoming a Zig zealot.
What I've discovered is that while it does regularize some of the syntax of C, the really noticeable thing about Zig is that it feels like C with all the stuff I (and everyone else) always end up building on my own built into the language: various allocators, error types, some basic safety guardrails, and so forth.
You can get clever with it if you want -- comptime is very, very powerful -- but it doesn't have strong opinions about how clever you should be. And as with C, you end up using most of the language most of the time.
I don't know if this is the actual criterion for feature inclusion and exclusion among the Zig devs, but it feels something like "Is this in C, or do C hackers regularly create this because C doesn't have it?" Allocators? Yes. Error unions? Yes. Pattern matching facilities? Not so much. ADTs? Uh, maybe really stupid ones? Generics, eh . . . sometimes people hack that together when it feels really necessary, but mostly they don't.
Something like this, it seems to me, results in features Zig has, features Zig will never have, and features that are enabled by comptime. And it's keeping the language small, elegant, and practical. I'm a big time C fan, and I love it.