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

> 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

This is 100% a real concern.

If I'm going to choose Zig, it's because it is SO much better on some axis that the community/adoption isn't an issue as I gain the benefits almost immediately. That means that C++ and Rust probably aren't in the scope of choice anyway.

I especially like the comment from elsewhere in thread where they are using it for scripting, of all things, because they can pop out code that builds and works on Windows and Linux. That's a good example--you gain the benefits immediately even if you later have to unwind that to something like Python.