Zig is hard but worth it

My main issue with Zig is that I’m scared to invest time in writing something nontrivial to see the community/adoption flounder then regret not using Rust or C++ later

The language itself is fun. The explicit-ness of choosing how allocation is done feels novel, and comptime is a clean solution for problems that are ugly in most languages.

Aside from lack of community I’d say the biggest nuisance is error handling in nearly everything including allocations. I get that allocation can fail but the vast majority of programs I write, I just want to panic on an allocation failure (granted these aren’t production programs…)

Edit: in retrospect, allocator error handling verbosity is probably necessary due to the power the language gives you in choosing allocators. If I use the general purpose allocator then my edge case is PC out of memory; if I use a fixed buffer allocator, a failed allocation is a code bug or a common error case, so we might want to handle the failed allocation and recover

> Aside from lack of community I’d say the biggest nuisance is error handling in nearly everything including allocations. I get that allocation can fail but the vast majority of programs I write, I just want to panic on an allocation failure (granted these aren’t production programs…)

The C strategy for this was just to wrap malloc() with something called xmalloc or malloc_nofail or whatever:

  void *malloc_nofail(...) {
    void *res = malloc(...);
    if (res == NULL) {
      abort();
    }
    return res;
  }

(Or whatever.) The same would work in Zig, I think.

Yes you can easily make a one liner allocation function in zig that takes an allocator as input with a comptime type and panics if allocation fails and returns the unwrapped allocation

I just say nuisance because zig code often looks like Go code in that almost every return type becomes an error union as allocation error handling (and maybe other errors) trickle up