0.16 ... maybe in 2050 they will finally release v1.0.
Jokes aside, once Jai comes out, Zig will become obsolete. Odin might hang on, as it is quite a bit smaller and limited language. Rust is being forced into every low level codebase, so that one will stay. C3, well, no one is using that, like Carbon. But Zig... despite running some big projects, it has no future.
Other languages debate for years, because they have a customer base with important applications into production that don't find funny that their code is broken with experiments.
Zig is years away to become industry relevant, if at all, of course they can experiment all they like.
It's hard to imagine Zig ever becoming stable and conservative. Even at 10 years old, it's still as beta as ever. At some point the churn becomes part of the culture.
Not a complaint, just an observation. I like that they are trying new things.
This is a great point, and it's actually something I really enjoy that the JVM and Java do nowadays by namespacing the new experimental APIs that you test from release to release and then it's stabilized like that, and becomes broadly available.
This is my favourite way to iterate, but the hard lesson is at some point after trying a bunch of things comes the Big Cleanup (tm). Is that a potential issue for this with Zig?
I have my doubts on Jai, besides being built towards game development, from what I read/watched about it, it has 2 or 3 meta programming capabilities, like comptime, macros, etc it feels too much of the same, also Jai is not built towards correctness or safety, John mentality is that he knows what he is doing, so he doesn’t need those guardrails and he wants instead expressiveness.
Also Jai is like C++ in complexity, while Zig is similar to C, very simple language.
Carbon is vaporware so far, there’s no language that could be used yet, because they first need to solve the C++ interop and fast compilation times, that is what will shape the language, so no one is using it, because it doesn’t exist yet.
Good luck with that, it is basically Modula-2 with C like syntax, and we aren't even getting into the whole ecosystem that it is missing on.
Any C++ or C replacement will need to win the earths of mainstream OS and game console vendors, otherwise it will remain yet another wannabe candidate.
Those have already their own languages, alongside their own C and C++ compilers, and are only now starting to warm up to Rust.
Zig or any other candidate will have a very hard time being considered.
So no one should even try because they will never win over all of the C/C++ crowd so are doomed to fail and forever to be a wannabe? I think Andrew has gone about things in a good way, going back to C and exploiting hindsight, not trying to offer everything as quickly as possible. Extend C but keep C interoperability and do both better than C++ instead of trying to be the next big thing and he goes about it in a very deliberate and calculated way. He may not succeed, but the effort has given us a great deal.
Remember that it was Jai that inspired all these new languages. When you talk about the capabilities like comptime, that's all from Jai and why John no longer does public presentations(as people keep stealing his unfinished ideas).
Your comment about gamedev focus makes no sense as that it the most hardcore segment of all the programming there is. So if a language is good for gamedev, it's good for everything else - with high performance.
I'm still in the GC camp with Go and don't see myself leaving any time soon but Zig is just rust-fugly and takes for ever to complete(it started 10 years ago, mind you). Odin is essentially complete, just lacks official spec. I like it but can' bring myself to use it as it lacks methods and I won' be going back to writing a procedural code like its 2002.
I'm curious to see Jai being released, despite having no use case for it. My initial post is merely about purposefulness, or the lack of, for named programming languages as nowadays John's name will carry more weight than Zig could ever have. so without Zig being 1.0 after a decade, and having no competitive advantage over Jai, it has no chance to survive after Jai is released. As I said, Odin will likely will as it is quite simpler, more niche language. Zig just goes directly against Jai and it will lose.
Kinda weird to blame Zig for not being at 1.0 yet while Jai is still in closed beta after 11 years. Meanwhile Zig is being in used in big-ish projects all over while Jai has... a single game engine? Jai looks cool but it's far far FAR behind and losing ground.
I feel like this is doomerism with high bias - i'm sorry but there is nothing founded here ; for all I know ; if Zig is able to put only one good reason to be used - some people will use it and not care - however this is a purely logical statement and I do not know of Zig so I might be blind here.
Being at 0.16 right now does not mean much. From what I gather, he is more focused on the semantics right now and trying to avoid getting bitten by a lack of foresight down the road, as most every language is. Things will probably start moving more quickly as the language solidifies.
> Both of these are based on userspace stack switching, sometimes called “fibers”, “stackful coroutines”, or “green threads”.
0.16 ... maybe in 2050 they will finally release v1.0.
Jokes aside, once Jai comes out, Zig will become obsolete. Odin might hang on, as it is quite a bit smaller and limited language. Rust is being forced into every low level codebase, so that one will stay. C3, well, no one is using that, like Carbon. But Zig... despite running some big projects, it has no future.
Instead of debating for years (like other languages), zig just tries things out. Worst case you can always rollback changes.
IMO best APIs and designs are those that are battle tested by end users, not won in an argument war during committee meetings.
This makes zig unique. It's fun to use and it stays fresh.
You can always just stay on older version of zig. But if you choose to update to newer version, you get new tools to make your code tidier/faster.
Other languages debate for years, because they have a customer base with important applications into production that don't find funny that their code is broken with experiments.
Zig is years away to become industry relevant, if at all, of course they can experiment all they like.
Obviously, that comes with the language being in beta. If you don't want things broken, use a complete language.
It's hard to imagine Zig ever becoming stable and conservative. Even at 10 years old, it's still as beta as ever. At some point the churn becomes part of the culture.
Not a complaint, just an observation. I like that they are trying new things.
This is a great point, and it's actually something I really enjoy that the JVM and Java do nowadays by namespacing the new experimental APIs that you test from release to release and then it's stabilized like that, and becomes broadly available.
This is my favourite way to iterate, but the hard lesson is at some point after trying a bunch of things comes the Big Cleanup (tm). Is that a potential issue for this with Zig?
From my perspective zig doesn't have "big cleanup" upfront. It's removing older features as it goes.
stdlib changes as it wants from version to version. So do language features. Since zig is pre-1.0, zig foundation isn't scared of breaking changes.
0.16's IO API changes might be that cleanup.
> Instead of debating for years (like other languages), zig just tries things out.
So did Rust pre-1.0
Stability guarantees are a pain in the neck. You can't just break other people's code willy nilly.
> This makes zig unique. It's fun to use and it stays fresh.
You mean like how Rust tried green threads pre-1.0? Rust gave up this one up because it made runtime too unwieldy for embedded devices.
I have my doubts on Jai, besides being built towards game development, from what I read/watched about it, it has 2 or 3 meta programming capabilities, like comptime, macros, etc it feels too much of the same, also Jai is not built towards correctness or safety, John mentality is that he knows what he is doing, so he doesn’t need those guardrails and he wants instead expressiveness.
Also Jai is like C++ in complexity, while Zig is similar to C, very simple language.
Carbon is vaporware so far, there’s no language that could be used yet, because they first need to solve the C++ interop and fast compilation times, that is what will shape the language, so no one is using it, because it doesn’t exist yet.
>Also Jai is like C++ in complexity, while Zig is similar to C, very simple language.
And most importantly, Zig is aiming at being a C++ replacement with the simplicity of C, it is not trying to replace C.
I think you meant to say Jai, not Zig.
Good luck with that, it is basically Modula-2 with C like syntax, and we aren't even getting into the whole ecosystem that it is missing on.
Any C++ or C replacement will need to win the earths of mainstream OS and game console vendors, otherwise it will remain yet another wannabe candidate.
Those have already their own languages, alongside their own C and C++ compilers, and are only now starting to warm up to Rust.
Zig or any other candidate will have a very hard time being considered.
So no one should even try because they will never win over all of the C/C++ crowd so are doomed to fail and forever to be a wannabe? I think Andrew has gone about things in a good way, going back to C and exploiting hindsight, not trying to offer everything as quickly as possible. Extend C but keep C interoperability and do both better than C++ instead of trying to be the next big thing and he goes about it in a very deliberate and calculated way. He may not succeed, but the effort has given us a great deal.
Remember that it was Jai that inspired all these new languages. When you talk about the capabilities like comptime, that's all from Jai and why John no longer does public presentations(as people keep stealing his unfinished ideas).
Your comment about gamedev focus makes no sense as that it the most hardcore segment of all the programming there is. So if a language is good for gamedev, it's good for everything else - with high performance.
I'm still in the GC camp with Go and don't see myself leaving any time soon but Zig is just rust-fugly and takes for ever to complete(it started 10 years ago, mind you). Odin is essentially complete, just lacks official spec. I like it but can' bring myself to use it as it lacks methods and I won' be going back to writing a procedural code like its 2002.
I'm curious to see Jai being released, despite having no use case for it. My initial post is merely about purposefulness, or the lack of, for named programming languages as nowadays John's name will carry more weight than Zig could ever have. so without Zig being 1.0 after a decade, and having no competitive advantage over Jai, it has no chance to survive after Jai is released. As I said, Odin will likely will as it is quite simpler, more niche language. Zig just goes directly against Jai and it will lose.
> why John no longer does public presentations(as people keep stealing his unfinished ideas)
That's your opinion or you have a source for that?
> Jokes aside
Ok ok, good
> once Jai comes out
Dangit! You couldn't even make it to the end of the sentence.
Kinda weird to blame Zig for not being at 1.0 yet while Jai is still in closed beta after 11 years. Meanwhile Zig is being in used in big-ish projects all over while Jai has... a single game engine? Jai looks cool but it's far far FAR behind and losing ground.
I feel like this is doomerism with high bias - i'm sorry but there is nothing founded here ; for all I know ; if Zig is able to put only one good reason to be used - some people will use it and not care - however this is a purely logical statement and I do not know of Zig so I might be blind here.
Being at 0.16 right now does not mean much. From what I gather, he is more focused on the semantics right now and trying to avoid getting bitten by a lack of foresight down the road, as most every language is. Things will probably start moving more quickly as the language solidifies.
Any backwards compatible language will accumulate hindsight errors. It's practically inevitable.
There are high profile apps written in Zig, Bun (bought by Anthropic) and Ghostty also Uber use it. What apps are written in Jai or Odin.
odin - jangafx’s embergen[1]
jai - thekla’s new game, announced but not yet released —- order of the sinking star[2]
[1]: https://jangafx.com/software/embergen
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_the_Sinking_Star
Can you elaborate? Zig has a lot of traction already.
Except for Tiger Beetle customers and the few ones using Bun, what traction?
Let it come out before we get to chest beating. We are talking about shipped features in Zig here.
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