alt Hacker News> Instead of debating for years (like other languages), zig just tries things out.
Good
> Worst case you can always rollback changes.
No, you cannot. People will leave in masses. In perl they announced experiments with a mandatory use experimental :feature. You couldnt publish modules with those, or else you are at risk.
This made perl exciting and fresh. Python on the other hand constantly broke API's, and had to invent package version locks and "safe" venv's. Which became unsafe of course.
Languages and stdlib are not playgrounds. We see what came out of it with C and C++ with horrible mistakes getting standardized.
I recently ditched zig because of this.
I thought it was stable enough initially but they completely broke fuzz testing feature and didn’t fix it.
Also build system API and some other APIs change and it is super annoying.
Find it much better to use c23 with _BitInt integers and some macros and context passing for error handling.
Also some things like stack traces were broken in small ways in zig. It would report wrong lines in stack traces when compiling with optimizations. Also wasn’t able to cleanly collect stack traces into strings in production build.
It is understandable that breaking APIs is good for development but in most cases new API isn’t that good anyway.
And recently saw they even moved the time/Instant API to some other place too. This kind of thing is just super annoying with seemingly no benefit. Could have left the same API there and re-used it from somewhere else. But no, have to make it “perfect”