Comment by lifthrasiir
3 hours ago
The same concern applies to every GC language, so it's not necessarily bad for Zig. Bun can have been grown too large for Zig to be effective, while moderately sized projects may still greatly benefit from Zig.
3 hours ago
The same concern applies to every GC language, so it's not necessarily bad for Zig. Bun can have been grown too large for Zig to be effective, while moderately sized projects may still greatly benefit from Zig.
I thought Zig was supposed to be a C replacement (as in, it doesn't actually provide full safety in the way that Rust or a GC language would)?
Oh, yeah that might be confusing. I meant "you can say the same thing for GC language if that's true, which isn't necessarily true, so that must be false".
More precisely speaking: GC languages are said to delay memory problems far beyond the horizon, which is often unreachable throughout the project's history. Zig can be a similar case.
Ah, I understand now. That said, I still think there's a pretty strong argument that this is a lot worse for Zig than a GC language, because they also give you safety for that overhead (and potentially ergonomics). When a language is trying to operate in the same niche as C with what seems to be an overt attempt to be less cumbersome than Rust even if it makes it less safe, it's a bit concerning to see that even without the safety it seems to have more overhead rather than less. Put another way: it sounds like it might as well just add a GC if it's not going to be competitive on performance.