alt Hacker NewsLow-level doesn’t mean more information, it means more explicit.
In Zig, that means being able to use the language itself to express type level computations. Instead of Rust’s an angle brackets and trait constraints and derive syntax. Or C++ templates.
Sure, it won’t beat a language with sugar for the exact thing you’re doing, but the whole point is that you’re a layer below the sugar and can do more.
Option<T> is trivial. But Tuple<N>? Parameterizing a struct by layout, AoS vs SoA? Compile time state machines? Parser generators? Serialization? These are likely where Zig would shine compared to the others.
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> Option<T> is trivial. But Tuple<N>? Parameterizing a struct by layout, AoS vs SoA? Compile time state machines? Parser generators? Serialization? These are likely where Zig would shine compared to the others.
I don't see how any of that becomes easier in the Zig case. It's just extra syntactic ceremony. The Rust version conveys the exact same information.
I don't think there is a standardized meaning of 'low-level'. I think a useful definition is that a low-level language controls more/is explicit about more properties of execution.
So zig/c/c++/rust all have ways to specify when and where should allocations happen, as well as memory layout of objects.
Expressivity is a completely different axis on which these low-level languages separate. C has ultra-low expressivity, you can barely create any meaningful abstraction there. Zig is much better at the price of remarkably small amount of extra language complexity. And c++ and rust have a huge amount of extra language complexity for the high expressivity they provide (given that they have to be expressive even on the low-level details makes e.g. rust more complex as a language than a similar, GC-d language would be, but this is a necessity).
As for this particular case, I don't really see a level difference here, both languages can express the same memory layout here.