alt Hacker News> I think the Zig people are really just concerned that maybe Zig itself is a DOA language because it doesn't offer enough over C for any serious use and their flagship project has now abandoned it.
You hit the nail on the head there. Zig is 10 years old now and it’s pretty clear that the industry isn’t biting, compared to the behemoth that is Rust. Between Rust, C, and C++ there is very little room for another language with a woefully incomplete library ecosystem to establish itself.
A true competitor would need to offer genuine extra value, such as dependent types or other formal verification features, to carve out a niche.
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The industry isn't biting @ Zig because it's unstable, notoriously difficult to integrate new changes into an existing codebase and because the compiler is a bitch to develop with (hard error on unused variables with no way to turn it off).
Python was invented two years before Java and didn’t move the needle until the mid 2010s.
You are the typical mark for hype cycles. Get a clue will you.
> it’s pretty clear that the industry isn’t biting
Zig isn't finished yet (they still have not released a v1.0). They're still iterating on the language itself and want the flexibility to make backwards-incompatible changes while they do so.
So in a sense, they have not yet asked anybody in mainstream industry to "bite." After v1.0, when there's an understanding of stability and ongoing language support, industry adoption or lack thereof might become a relevant metric for measuring the project's health. But right now that's not relevant at all.
> A true competitor would need to offer genuine extra value, such as dependent types or other formal verification features, to carve out a niche.
believe it or not it is generally easy to do this with zig with few modifications (WIP), and the team has said publically that they will be making this sort of thing a supported operation once the IR stabilizes post-1.0.
https://github.com/ityonemo/clr/