alt Hacker NewsI really love everything about zig except the language itself. The governance, the culture, all of it seem really cool, but reading https://ziglang.org/learn/why_zig_rust_d_cpp/ I still don't get _why_ I would use it. To an untrained eye, it seems like go, but with manual allocation. Or an imperative-only rust. Like it has some features of all the languages it competes with, but not the ones that would make me reach for them. What do people use zig for, and why zig and not one of the others?
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> What do people use zig for, and why zig and not one of the others?
I'm the maintainer of zigler (https://zigler.hexdocs.pm/Zig.html), and I have my own pharma startup. I currently use zig in two contexts:
1) wraps a proprietary .so file that is used to communicate with a scientific (microscope) digital camera, in a nice BEAM-module-shaped interface. Sorry, code is private.
2) I have a vue.js component that does DNA editing, and one of the features is DNA sequence alignment, and so I had claude write the smith-waterman lalign algorithm in zig, and it compiles to wasm, and this plus going from O(N^2) to O(N) dropped the runtime of an alignment from 30s to a few hundred ms, in both cases so much better than ~5m using a web SAAS, good enough that I can render alignments on-demand, and I don't have to do a storage layer for alignments.
https://github.com/Vidala-Labs/opengenepool/tree/master/src/...
you can play with it at:
https://opengenepool.vidalalabs.com
Two sequences may be aligned by right-clicking a sequence name when a sequence is loaded, it will align the two sequences (you'll have to create a second sequence as it forbids aligning a sequence with itself).
Why zig? Because it just makes things like cross-compilation easier (microscope is mounted on a elixir nerves deployment!), and has less footguns, and doesn't hide away things you might care about. Most of the things i build with zig don't really have a concern about memory safety, or have such trivial memory patterns that it's easy to verify by eye that they're memory safe.
I have the same feeling about Zig. In this interview [1], Andrew Kelley, creator of Zig, explains a lot of the features of the language; compares it against c, rust, go; and explains why he created the language. According to him, the killer feature of zig is the tool chain (compiler, linker, build system) since it has no dependencies. So, it will work in any OS/target you choose.
It is a really interesting interview. However, Zig code is a bit hard for me to read.
I’m writing a game engine in Zig and after tens of thousands of lines written, I have to say my mind has totally melded to the language. It really hits a sweet spot for me between being expressive enough, and there only being one way to do something most of the time.
> To an untrained eye, it seems like go, but with manual allocation.
I've written a decent amount of Zig, Go, and C, and I often describe Zig as in between Go and C. So your untrained eye seems pretty accurate. Maybe it's just not the tool you need, and that's fine! I could get excited about a new tractor that is well built and leans heavily into right to repair activism, but I live in a city and wouldn't use it.
I think this blog post has a great description of the "Modern C" niche Zig fills: https://vfoley.xyz/hare/. I tend to think of Zig in this way. If you found yourself reaching for C, you could instead reach for Zig. You'd get optionals instead of null pointers, comptime instead of macros, a real facility for handling errors, etc. It's like C but with some of the sharp edges sanded off.
Try reading zig code. For me its much more readable than the other languages, and does not suffer the fact go doesnt have language level errors. Local allocators are very useful and if you dont think so, perhaps you havent dwelved too deeply into systems programming or the language isnt targeted for you.
If you want something better than C you aren't going to reach for Go (GC) or Rust (complexity).
Zig looks like a good middle ground.
> why zig and not one of the others?
I think one of the selling points is that the language does not come to your way and allows unsafe constructs. So, I think the target audience is roughly at C and C++ users.
C is over 50 years old, but it is still more or less the lingua franca of computing. The world benefits from having "C with some improvements from 50 years of learning". The world also benefits from having featureful languages that are a huge divergence from C, but it also just needs a language that provides a thin cross-hardware abstraction over the asm layer and some conveniences over writing raw asm. We don't need every language to be massively featureful, and we hopefully won't all have to reach for C for the rest of human civilization when we need a language that isn't massively featureful.
I really think the best way to describe it is an attempt to replace C.
Go is only like C in that it's simple. But it's clearly not a direct C replacement. It's not a great language for writing an OS or embedded code.
Rust may replace C in many contexts, but Rust is much more like C++. It adds a lot of complexity to the language and the compiler. I think it does it in a much better way than C++ so I think it is more likely to replace C in certain contexts where C++ did not replace C.
But Zig really is a much more direct replacement for C. It's aiming at the same niche, but in a different way. And considering how much C still dominates systems programming, it should be pretty clear that if Zig succeeds in become a good replacement, the answer to your question is: you'd reach for it whenever you'd have reached for C before.
The only question at this time is if Rust will eat so much into that niche that what's left for Zig becomes too small. Though it could go the other way. Zig is simpler and easier, and you can iterate really quickly with it. There's even incremental compilation now. I suspect tests with debug allocators, the integrated fuzzing, static analysis and LLM assisted reviews, can make Zig just as safe as Rust in practice, with far less complexity. So maybe Zig will eat into Rusts niche (whenever Zig is mature, right now it's going the other way as seen with Bun)