What does HackerNews think of zig?

let me clarify some facts.

1. we never distributed debs for debian distributions. I have, however, been patiently collaborating with Debian maintainers with regards to the zig ITP: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=995670

2. we don't tell you to "just use a snap.". Please see https://github.com/ziglang/zig/#installation

3. we tag releases soon after llvm tags releases for the convenience of package maintainers. Distributions with LLVM 14 can package Zig 0.9.1; distributions with LLVM 15 can package Zig 0.10.1, etc.

- Ziglings is great - https://github.com/ratfactor/ziglings

- zig.news has some good posts https://zig.news/

- Zig's language docs: https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/

- Zig's standard library code https://github.com/ziglang/zig/

Just to tag onto this comment, for anybody interested the repo is:

https://github.com/ziglang/zig

The code in the lib/std directory is very readable, and I’d strongly encourage checking it out for anybody who wants to learn Zig or know what idiomatic Zig looks like.

?

https://github.com/ziglang/zig

Hi, right now Zig is still a bit wild. If you don't feel like looking into a language that is still moving at this speed (if you read the changelogs for the last few releases you'll see what I'm talking about), then you might want to wait a little.

Zig 0.7.0 is scheduled to be released soon and the main effort is being spent on porting the current C++ compiler to a self-hosted version. Once that's done, we'll be in a much better position to provide better stability for features.

During the last fundraiser we announced the intention of launching a Zig Stability Program once the self-hosted compiler is done, so that we can guarantee that any bug found in features that we decide to support are going to be prioritized appropriately. To be clear, this is a bug stability program, not an API stability one: we'll still redesign things from one version to the next if necessary.

In terms of timelines, we hope to have the self-hosted compiler replace the current one in version 0.8.0, indicatively 6 months from now.

If you want to help speed the development up:

https://github.com/ziglang/zig to contribute

https://github.com/sponsors/ziglang (or email us at [email protected]) to donate

Jai doesn't do very much in terms of memory safety, Zig [1] might be a better alternative + it actually exists.

1 - https://github.com/ziglang/zig

> I wonder if zig will ever pursue some sort of memory safety.

That's exactly what Zig is designed for [1].

Andrew Kelley (andrewrk) discusses this in the talk. Zig is similar to Rust, but with memory safety designed into the core, not bolted on as an afterthought. And as the SHA-256 demo tests in the talk show, Zig is as fast or faster than C.

[1] http://ziglang.org

[2] https://github.com/ziglang/zig