alt Hacker NewsOT: I'm always surprised at how popular Zig discussions get here, or Youtube and other medias.
Don't get me wrong, I love Zig and I think it's a great C replacement, but I'm very confused on why C3 or Odin rarely get any attention at all, despite being in the same C-replacement crowd.
But still surprised at what Zig does better than these other projects? Is Andrew much better at marketing/promoting the language? He's very hard to dislike.
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Andrew doesn't strike me as someone who does any marketing at all. He just wants to make the language he wants to use, and does it well.
Sometimes its just right time, right place. But also, Zig has received attention via projects like Ghostty, TigerBeetle, and Bun (prior to rewrite of course)
Andrew pushes lots of "social issues" so he has that crowd and they push zig as a way of pushing their social views.
I can only answer for me, and while I do think it's more significant a metric for me, I equally assume it probably has some influence on others as well.
C3 uses :: for namespaces, that makes it a competitor with C++ more than C. Equally Odin's syntax is more at home among python, not systems programming.
The appeal of Zig is it feels like C. To many people, this is a downside. C is very very scary to them. But for people who feel at home in C, it's not a downside.
Additionally, the selling point for both are "c replacement" where the selling point of Zig is "good systems programming language" C is only mentioned by it's users as a heuristic.
If 2 groups are trying to replace a language that people are running away from, and that's their best selling point... I'd assume they're less likely to be as successful as a different language just trying to be as good as it can be.
I've even stopped comparing Zig to C, IMO, it does a disservice to both. And I say that as someone who likes C.
Full disclosure, I need to spend a bit more time with both odin and c3 to know exactly how this compares. But the reason I keep writing Zig, and still love it, is how simple it is. Zig is aggressively insistant on simplicity at the expense of functionally or comfort. The only other high level language I know of that is as aggressive about it's design simplicity is infact C. While I assume it's an accident when C does it, it's definitely not an accident in Zig.
With Zig, I can just import SDL.h and use it without writing a binding.
Can I do that in C3 or Odin?
Yes, Andrew did a lot of internet cult marketing over the years, and then you have exponential free cult marketing.
I think Andrew is a big part of it, and the people he surrounded himself with are the other part. What kind of pre-1.0 language hosts conventions? Crazy that they manage to do that. Andrew's vision has always been clear and inspiring to me. I think this got Zig its initial following, and they have capitalized extremely well on it to grow as a community.