The single best feature (and I would say the _core_ feature separating it from C) that C++ has to offer is RAII and zig does not have that. So I don’t know which good parts of C++ they kept. Zig is more of its own thing, and they take from wherever they like, not just C++.
Zig has defer, which is arguably way simpler. Is there something RAII can do that defer can't?
Not everyone likes RAII by itself. Allocating and deallocating things one at a time is not always efficient. That is not the only way to use RAII but it's the most prevalent way.
defer can't emulate the destructors of objects that outlives their lexical scope. Return values and heap objects are examples of these since they outlive the function they were created in. defer only supports enqueuing actions at lexical boundaries.
If you destroy an object that outlives the lexical scope it was created in, then you have to clean up manually.
I really wish that were true but it isn’t. Modern C++ templates/constexpr are much more powerful and expressive than any Zig comptime equivalent.
The power and expressiveness of the C++ compile-time capabilities are the one thing I strongly miss when using other languages. The amount of safety and conciseness those features enable makes not having them feel like a giant step backward. Honestly, if another systems language had something of similar capability I’d consider switching.
I have written a lot of Zig comptime code and ended up finding the opposite. In C++ I find I have to bend over backward to get what I want done, often resulting in insane compile times. I've used metaprogramming libraries like Boost Hana before to have some more ergonomics, but even that I would consider inferior to comptime.
Out of curiosity, do you happen to have any examples of what you describe, where C++ is more powerful and expressive than Zig?
If it looks anything like what I read in "Modern C++ Design" 20+ years ago then I'll pass. That book made me realize the language wasn't for me anymore.
It looks nothing like C++ decades ago, it is effectively a completely different language. I found C++ unusable before C++11, and even C++11 feels archaic these days. Idiomatic C++20 and later is almost a decent language.
"Modern C++ Design" was the first book that highlighted template metaprogramming and showed you ways to use it as a Turing complete programming language in itself. Even a decade+ after it was printed my friend said it was recommended reading for employees within Google so I gave him mine - but I'm not sure about these days.
Talking about how much you can do with C++ templates made me think of that.
