Open-source Zig book

> Learning Zig is not just about adding a language to your resume. It is about fundamentally changing how you think about software.

I'm not sure what they expect, but to me Zig looks very much like C with a modern standard lib and slightly different syntax. This isn't groundbreaking, not a thought paradigm which should be that novel to most system engineers like for example OCaml could be. Stuff like this alienates people who want a technical justification for the use of a language.

There is nothing new under the Sun. However, some languages manifest as good rewrites of older languages. Rust is that for C++. Zig is that for C.

Rust is the small, beautiful language hiding inside of Modern C++. Ownership isn't new. It's the core tenet of RAII. Rust just pulls it out of the backwards-compatible kitchen sink and builds it into the type system. Rust is worth learning just so that you can fully experience that lens of software development.

Zig is Modern C development encapsulated in a new language. Most importantly, it dodges Rust and C++'s biggest mistake, not passing allocators into containers and functions. All realtime development has to rewrite their entire standard libraries, like with the EASTL.

On top of the great standard library design, you get comptime, native build scripts, (err)defer, error sets, builtin simd, and tons of other small but important ideas. It's just a really good language that knows exactly what it is and who its audience is.

I don't know man, Rust's borrowing semantics are pretty new under the sun, and actually do change the way you think about software. It's a pretty momentous paradigm shift.

Zig is nice too, but it's not that.

There were languages with lifetimes and borrowing mechanics before Rust. Rust packages these mechanics in a nice way. Just like Zig encodes many niceties in a useful C language (comptime, simple cross-compilation, stdlib).

Which ones?? Before Rust, to my knowledge, no language had an actually practical way to use lifetimes and borrow-checking so that both memory safety and concurrency safety (data races, which is huge) were solved, even though the concepts were known in research. Doing the actual work to make it practical is what makes the difference between some obscure research topic and a widely used language that actually solves serious problems in the real world.