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Comment by jabedude

6 hours ago

How is Zig doing as a project? I remember they took a hard line against AI

They seem to be doing fine. Tigerbeetle and Ghostty are two projects that continue to do well and are written in Zig. The foundation’s funding also seems to be doing well. They are continuing to make releases.

  • Ghostty is a strange example though because Mitchell is very keen on agentic engineering.

    • Strange in what way? Mitchell has also stated that he reviews every line of code that goes into Ghostty so I don't think its quite the same as the Bun rewrite.

It looks like they're spending 5 months what should be a 1 month job these days.

  • Filed a compiler bug related to dwarf tables that screws up debugging and line of code coverage that they completely ignored, just because I mentioned that I had every LLM check it to confirm it's a bug, since all I know is what kcov and every coverage tool generates incorrect coverage data for my repo, for 100% certain.

    • If they really insist on no LLM involvement at all then they're going to fall behind and lose out. Your LLM use case seems really very conservative - you didn't write any code with it, you just use it to confirm the bug. There are many OSS projects that are also taking a similar hardline against LLMs - people are going to fork them and then move on. I've had LLMs fix bugs/add features to a couple of projects like this and, well, they're missing out on the fixes/added features that I'm using locally.

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  • Can you offer any specifics? The ToC looks quite extensive, which to me indicates a lot of design decisions needed to be made (probably involving many people) and unclear how that process might be accelerated by AI.

    Unless you're suggesting the language design should also be vibed together?

    • > Unless you're suggesting the language design should also be vibed together?

      Sounds like a fun little project, have a bunch of AI pushers fork Zig and see if they can do a better job. I want to see results, not snarky HN comments. After all this progress, ChatGPT should be able to one-shot a better language since AI is so good now... right?

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  • Yep, it's true, but the reality of what it would take to actually fork and commence with healthy use of AI alongside with the elusive soft/hard stance needed to lead technically and socially is probably a bigger challenge than anyone is willing to take on! Soo.. slow and (rather?) well it goes for Zig.

Seems to be C++ing which is disappointing. Looking more at C3 and Odin for cases where I'd hoped Zig to land.