Comment by the-tomster
12 hours ago
> This is reinforcing my belief that Zig programmers actually just have a sort of aesthetic attachment to the idea of managing their allocations themselves and this has very little to do with the actual practical concerns of writing software that works.
Indeed if you don't want to manage everything yourself I don't think there's a need to use Zig. The whole pitch is making everything explicit and not hiding control flow. And I do think that limits its usefulness to smaller-scale codebases.
Writing quality software doesn't require much from the programming language until your codebase gets very large and you're collaborating with a ton of people. If I'm expecting a codebase to grow to a large scale I'm not reaching for Zig for that. I don't trust _myself_ to keep that much Zig code tidy and correct let alone a big mob of developers and agents :)
My opinion is quite the opposite.
With a small program, it's rarely difficult to work out what's going on. If your small program develops a performance problem, it's usually fairly tractable to work out what's going on, and modify it. In extremis, you can just rewrite the whole thing.
Large programs are another matter. Hidden control flows in C++ (for example) can make pinning down performance problems extremely difficult. And then widespread refactoring can be extremely challenging.
Zig forces everything to be an explicit interface, which should make maintenance work on large programs much more tractable.