On: What Zig felt like, coming from Rust

[kllrnohj]

Zig is exciting to people that still actually like C. Is that a rationale choice? Not very often. Is it a wrong choice? Also again not very often. At least, not for anything in scope of a solo dev.

The industry where it seems strongest positioned is embedded. Will it actually break into that domain? No idea.

[epolanski → kllrnohj]

People that like C, won't move from C and don't have many reasons to do so.

It's the lingua franca of software development.

Zig is appealing to the "I'd like to work in a C-like system programming language but I'm not a C veteran" crowd.

Not a small crowd by any means, but will always be a niche.

[a96 → epolanski]

As a C veteran, Zig is interesting to me because of the compiler that still happily eats C. It has potential as a (cross!) development tool that can do a bit more than C tools alone. Which also describes Rust to some extent, but I think Rust would be more a full replacement. Which in turn is exciting because there hasn't been anything before that might replace C in my (embedded or -ish) environment.

I haven't actually tried to find out if that Zig promise is real, though. Just some trivial little things. No day job excuse and no personal projects where it would fit.