Four Years of Jai (2024)

I sincerely dread that by the time jblow releases jai, people will just have moved on to zig or rust, and that it will just become irrelevant.

I'm sure jblow is having the same fears, and I hope to be wrong.

Still, it's fun to be remembering the first few videos about "hey, I have those ideas for a language". Great that he could afford to work on it.

Sometimes, mandalas are what we need.

I think the Zig community should worry more about when Jai is released. Esp given that Zig isn’t anywhere near 1.0 yet, and feature wise it’s a rather sparse language that has first mover advantage over alternatives, but as a language it actually doesn’t bring many new tools AND is bad with IDEs.

Jai similarly is hard for IDEs, but has much more depth and power.

While Zig has momentum, it will need to solidify it to become mainstream, or Jai has a good chance of disrupting Zig’s popularity. Basically Zig is Jai but minus A LOT of features, while being more verbose and annoyingly strict about things.

Odin on the other hand has no compile time and in general has different solutions compared to Zig & Jai with its rich set of builtin types and IDE friendliness.

And finally C3 which is for people who want the familiarity of C with improvement but still IDE friendliness with limited metaprogramming. This language is also less of an overlap with Jai than Zig is.