Open-source Zig book

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.

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.

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

Zig on the other specifically addresses syntax shortcomings in part of C. And it does it well. That claim of rust making C more safe because it’s more readable applies to Zig more than it does to Rust.

I feel like the reason the rust zealots lobby like crazy to embed rust everywhere is twofold. One is that they genuinely believe in it and the other is that they know that if other languages that address one of the main rust claims without all the cruft gains popularity they lose the chance of being permanently embdedded in places like the kernel. Because once they’re in it’s a decade long job market

But regardless of how much one likes Zig, it addresses none of the problems that Rust seeks to solve. It's not a replacement for Rust at all, and isn't suitable for any of the domains where Rust excels.

That's a pretty bold claim since Zig is specifically designed for systems programming, low level stuff, network services, databases (think Tigerbeetle). It's not memory safe like Rust is, but it comes with constructs that make it simple to build largely memory safe programs.

Right, this is the specific important thing that Rust does that Zig doesn't (with the caveat that Rust includes the `unsafe` mechanism - as a marked, non-default option - specifically to allow for necessary low-level memory manipulation that can't be checked for correctness by the compiler). Being able to guarantee that something can't happen is more valuable than making it simple to do something correctly most of the time.

So Zig would fail that, but then you could also consider C++ unsuitable for production software - and we know it clearly is still suitable.

I predict Zig will just become more and more popular (and with better, although not as complete- memory safety), and be applied to mission critical infra.