alt Hacker News0.16 ... maybe in 2050 they will finally release v1.0.
Jokes aside, once Jai comes out, Zig will become obsolete. Odin might hang on, as it is quite a bit smaller and limited language. Rust is being forced into every low level codebase, so that one will stay. C3, well, no one is using that, like Carbon. But Zig... despite running some big projects, it has no future.
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I have my doubts on Jai, besides being built towards game development, from what I read/watched about it, it has 2 or 3 meta programming capabilities, like comptime, macros, etc it feels too much of the same, also Jai is not built towards correctness or safety, John mentality is that he knows what he is doing, so he doesn’t need those guardrails and he wants instead expressiveness.
Also Jai is like C++ in complexity, while Zig is similar to C, very simple language.
Carbon is vaporware so far, there’s no language that could be used yet, because they first need to solve the C++ interop and fast compilation times, that is what will shape the language, so no one is using it, because it doesn’t exist yet.
Kinda weird to blame Zig for not being at 1.0 yet while Jai is still in closed beta after 11 years. Meanwhile Zig is being in used in big-ish projects all over while Jai has... a single game engine? Jai looks cool but it's far far FAR behind and losing ground.
> Jokes aside
Ok ok, good
> once Jai comes out
Dangit! You couldn't even make it to the end of the sentence.
I feel like this is doomerism with high bias - i'm sorry but there is nothing founded here ; for all I know ; if Zig is able to put only one good reason to be used - some people will use it and not care - however this is a purely logical statement and I do not know of Zig so I might be blind here.
Being at 0.16 right now does not mean much. From what I gather, he is more focused on the semantics right now and trying to avoid getting bitten by a lack of foresight down the road, as most every language is. Things will probably start moving more quickly as the language solidifies.
There are high profile apps written in Zig, Bun (bought by Anthropic) and Ghostty also Uber use it. What apps are written in Jai or Odin.
Let it come out before we get to chest beating. We are talking about shipped features in Zig here.
WalterBright reply in 3...2...1...
Instead of debating for years (like other languages), zig just tries things out. Worst case you can always rollback changes.
IMO best APIs and designs are those that are battle tested by end users, not won in an argument war during committee meetings.
This makes zig unique. It's fun to use and it stays fresh.
You can always just stay on older version of zig. But if you choose to update to newer version, you get new tools to make your code tidier/faster.