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Interview with Zig language creator Andrew Kelley [video]

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200 points jorangreef | 3 comments | 27 Aug 20 11:10 UTC | HN request time: 0.613s | source
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Kednicma ◴[27 Aug 20 12:01 UTC] No.24292785[source]▶
I hope that we're not stuck writing piles of low-level code for all eternity. We don't need more than a few pages of each low-level language, and while I do really like Zig's qualities compared to C, I'd still like to minimize the amount of Zig or C total that has to be written.

I think that our community's equivalent of "where's my flying car?" is "where's my higher-level language?"

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pron ◴[27 Aug 20 12:45 UTC] No.24293085[source]▶
Who's the "we" who are "stuck"? The vast majority of programmers don't use low-level languages for writing applications even today, but there is a big niche of domains where close to perfect control is needed and that's the domain low level languages like C, C++, Ada, Rust and Zig try to address. I wouldn't (and don't) write "ordinary" applications in those languages, but I don't think the domains they target will ever go away or become less important.
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1. notacoward ◴[27 Aug 20 13:01 UTC] No.24293221[source]▶
> The vast majority of programmers don't use low-level languages for writing applications

I work in a multi-million-line codebase, a significant majority of which is very far from that "need perfect control" domain but is written in a what I'd call a mid-level language - a high-abstraction dialect of C++. So I'd say GP is correct, that too many people are stuck writing code in the wrong language for the task at hand. The need for languages like Zig to improve the lower-level experience (which, as you say, is not going away) and the need for higher-level languages for more common types of programs are not in conflict. They're complementary. It's the mid-level languages that need to DIAF, because they're not really suited for either and pretending to be more general than they are only encourages people to make choices that hurt them.

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2. pron ◴[27 Aug 20 13:06 UTC] No.24293276[source]▶
I totally agree, and I think that C++ is exactly this "wrong kind of language," and Rust follows in its footsteps, but I'm sure others disagree. For example, for decades Microsoft has shown an attraction to this kind of languages (they love C++, C# is going down that path, and they're showing interest in Rust), so it might ultimately be a matter of taste -- a personal aesthetic preference -- unless somebody is ever able to make some empirical observations that show an objective benefit to one approach over another.
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3. int_19h ◴[02 Sep 20 23:18 UTC] No.24359314[source]▶
How is C# similar to C++ in that regard? It's a much higher-level language.