Re:Why Zig over C for Systems Programming
by bunderbunder on Friday November 13, 2026 @05:29PM
(#50490959)
I’ll admit I interpreted that “you” in pron’s sentence to be a colloquial “you” and not an imperative one. So, more of a statement of their own preference than a strong statement of how things should be.
The point is, it’s a tradeoff. With overloading, exactly which code executes on a specific line becomes a bit more implicit because it depends on extra information from the surrounding context: the types of the arguments.
That comes with the usual tradeoffs. On the one hand, you could argue that the compiler is taking care of it for you, which saves the programmer from having to manually deal with it, and removes some visual clutter from the code.
But you can also argue that letting the choice of function be implicit means that a programmer who wants/needs to keep track of exactly what every line of code is doing needs to carry all that contextual information in their own head, too. For this programmer, it’s adding to the mental burden.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Kelley constantly brings up how Zig was inspired by difficulties writing a digital audio workstation with very hard real-time requirements. Part of what he’s doing there is giving a motivating case for why he wants to be an absolute control freak about, e.g., micro-managing exactly when memory is allocated and deallocated. That’s something only a subset of systems programmers need, because not all systems programming is dealing with things like hard real-time.
The point is, it’s a tradeoff. With overloading, exactly which code executes on a specific line becomes a bit more implicit because it depends on extra information from the surrounding context: the types of the arguments.
That comes with the usual tradeoffs. On the one hand, you could argue that the compiler is taking care of it for you, which saves the programmer from having to manually deal with it, and removes some visual clutter from the code.
But you can also argue that letting the choice of function be implicit means that a programmer who wants/needs to keep track of exactly what every line of code is doing needs to carry all that contextual information in their own head, too. For this programmer, it’s adding to the mental burden.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Kelley constantly brings up how Zig was inspired by difficulties writing a digital audio workstation with very hard real-time requirements. Part of what he’s doing there is giving a motivating case for why he wants to be an absolute control freak about, e.g., micro-managing exactly when memory is allocated and deallocated. That’s something only a subset of systems programmers need, because not all systems programming is dealing with things like hard real-time.