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Zig breaking change – Initial Writergate

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228 points Retro_Dev | 3 comments | 04 Jul 25 04:11 UTC | HN request time: 1.267s | source
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brabel ◴[04 Jul 25 06:33 UTC] No.44461708[source]▶
I like Zig but it seems to just keep redesigning itself, while other languages like Odin “shipped” long ago and don’t seem to need to look back. Is Zig suffering from perfectionism syndrome where things are never good enough??
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silisili ◴[04 Jul 25 06:39 UTC] No.44461733[source]▶
That's kinda my experience with watching Zig. It went from 'look how simple this is' to 'look at this new feature syntax' long ago.

People used to compare it as simpler than Rust. I don't agree that it's simple anymore at all.

None of this is meant to be badmouthing or insulting. I'm a polyglot but love simple languages and syntaxes, so I tend to overly notice such things.

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1. Laremere ◴[04 Jul 25 07:20 UTC] No.44461986[source]▶
The computer is a machine, and modern ones are complicated. When I am programming, I want to precisely control that machine. For me, simplicity is measured in how complicated it is to get the machine to do what I want it to do. So, eg, having several different operators for adding two integers sounds complicated. However there is simplicity in not having to reach far to actually get the correct behavior, and there is some simplicity in the process of being forced to make that choice as it irons about what behavior you actually want.
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2. silisili ◴[04 Jul 25 07:24 UTC] No.44462005[source]▶
I think that's long been the argument of simplicity. 'Simple to remember' vs 'simple to perform.'

I tend to fall into the former camp. Something like BF would be the ultimate simple language, even if not particularly useful.

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3. lewdwig ◴[04 Jul 25 08:42 UTC] No.44462516[source]▶
Structured concurrency is a notoriously hard problem. This is part of Zig’s 4th attempt to get it right.