Comment by charlie90

3 months ago

>Learning Zig is not just about adding a language to your resume. It is about fundamentally changing how you think about software.

Zig is just C with a marketing push. Most developers already know C.

19 comments

charlie90

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dcre  3 months ago

I suspect most developers do not know C.

  • downrightmike  3 months ago

    C is fine C++ is where they jumped the shark

    • MyOutfitIsVague  3 months ago

      C++ is far better than C in very many ways. It's also far worse than C in very many other ways. Given a choice between the two, I'd still choose C++ every day just for RAII. There's only so much that we can blame programmers for memory leaks, use-after-free, buffer overflows, and other things that are still common in new C code. At some point, it is the language itself that is unsuitable and insufficient.

    • bnolsen  3 months ago

      C++ explored a lot of ideas that some modern languages borrowed. C++ just had to haul along all the cruft it inherited and built up.

    • pjmlp  3 months ago

      Until WG14 ackwnowledges the safety holes in C, isn't fine at all, it should be nuked.

    • jeltz  3 months ago

      No, C is not fine. It is a really bad language that I unfortunately have to code professionally.

keyle  3 months ago

That tagline unfortunately turned me off the book, without even starting to read.

I really don't need this kind of self-enlightenment rubbish.

What if I read the whole book and felt no change?

I think I understand SoA just fine.

  • xeonmc  3 months ago

    It is also just such a supremely unziglike thing to state.

    • Zambyte  3 months ago

      Early talks by Andrew explicitly leaned into the notion that "software can be perfect", which is a deviation from how most programmers view software development.

      Zig also encourages you to "think like a computer" (also an explicit goal stated by Andrew) even more than C does on modern machines, given things like real vectors instead of relying on auto vectorization, the lack of a standard global allocator, and the lack of implicit buffering on standard io functions.

      I would definitely put Zig on the list of languages that made me think about programming differently.

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