Why Zig When There Is Already CPP, D, and Rust? (2017)

Re:Why Zig When There Is Already CPP, D, and Rust? (2017) by nerdponx on Sunday October 14, 2018 @07:06PM (#18216100)

It's an interesting point. My experience with it, though, is that if the language is too simple, the complexity gets pushed off into the application. The result is "boilerplate", a lot of code that gets routinely cut&pasted into applications.

This is a frequent complaint I hear about Go: they made the language too simple in certain places. People also tend to cite Rich Hickey's distinction between "simple" and "easy".

So the question about Zig becomes one of what exactly was kept simple, and what was allowed to become complex?

I think the world would benefit from a Hyperpolyglot-style comparison here. Rosetta Code is too much of a mess; ideally, I want to see a thoughtful side by side comparison of the same program written in several languages, with commentary.

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Re:Why Zig When There Is Already CPP, D, and Rust? (2017) by int_19h on Sunday October 14, 2018 @07:32PM (#18216237)

Zig might get away with it by restricting itself to a narrow niche where this kind of simplicity is advantageous. Go tries to eat a much larger piece of the pie, and the deficiency is felt more as a result.

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Re:Why Zig When There Is Already CPP, D, and Rust? (2017) by veebat on Sunday October 14, 2018 @10:59PM (#18217119)

There's a profound wisdom to knowing the niche you're in, and Zig does seem to have that. The applications part of the stack is saturated with options, all trying to encroach on each other, but when it comes to the genuinely low-level, unsexy stuff...the viable options are all pretty old languages, and languages that patch over those old languages.

And with respect to discussion of boilerplate, you can, of course, always have a "Zig++" language that patches over Zig. By cutting out its own metaprogramming functionality, it's much more straightforward to generate useful Zig source. There are a lot of advantages to restraint in the design, and Go does share that, too.

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Re:Why Zig When There Is Already CPP, D, and Rust? (2017) by weberc2 on Sunday October 14, 2018 @07:28PM (#18216213)

I think many Go developers would consider this a feature (I do, anyway). A little boilerplate is better than a complex language. I say this with a background in C++, Java, and Python. I’m a fair bit more productive in Go and my code tends to be of higher quality (less headspace devoted to language complexity and more room for application complexity).

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