Zig is hard but worth it

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

But yeah, most of the time I don't even want to think which allocator to use let alone handle it's errors.

It took a bit of getting used to when I joined but we agreed as a team to have all meaningful scripts written in Zig not bash (for one, bash doesn't work on Windows without WSL and we need to support Windows builds/testing/etc.).

It makes about as much sense as any other cross-platform scripting option once I got used to it!

Some examples:

Docs generation: https://github.com/tigerbeetledb/tigerbeetle/blob/main/src/c...

Integration testing sample code: https://github.com/tigerbeetledb/tigerbeetle/blob/main/src/c...

Running a command wrapped in a TigerBeetle server run: https://github.com/tigerbeetledb/tigerbeetle/blob/main/src/c...

But mostly the team decided to do this because we wanted to unify on one language and double down on the investment in Zig.

I'm not a fanboy (nothing wrong if anyone is, just clarifying about myself); I think this choice was right.

It's much easier for most people to download a standalone "mac" or "windows" binary than to know if they already have the right version of Python or Perl or Clang (and all the transitive dependencies your project adds).