Why are people so obsessed with Zig when Odin has been stable, though not yet with official spec, for such a long time and used in real production for years? Is it just syntax preference or does Zig provide something amazing that I am missing? Not that I use any of them, I am not interested in manual memory management and i stick to Go. But I'm curious.
Zig has a lot of manpower behind it in comparison to Odin and this is one of the most important things for people, they see a proverbial crowd and that builds a lot more interest.
With that said, here are a couple of things you have in Zig that you don't get in Odin:
- Cross-compilation & cross-linking (more or less works): Odin doesn't do cross-linking.
- Comptime; you can actually use it to effectively get Functors from ML, which means passing in interfaces to modules and getting compile-time generated modules back (structs in this case)
- Error set inference; Zig can figure out the complete set of errors a code path can return and make sure you handle them, or bubble that exact set (plus your own errors) up. This comes with the caveat that Zig has no capability to attach actual data to the errors, so you have to side-channel that info if you have it. Odin doesn't do error inference apart from the type checking side of it, but does allow using tagged unions as errors, which is great. They still interact exactly as they ought to with the zero-value-as-no-error machinery.
I didn't use comptime much when I used Zig, and I like tagged unions as errors much more than I value being able to cross-link, so I decided that Odin was better for me. Defaulting to zero-values and the zero-value being blessed in terms of language features didn't feel right to me before I started using it but now I can't really imagine going back to not assuming the zero-value being there.
Thanks for the info. I'm curious to see what people will do when Jai will finally be released next year. So far, Rust has been gaining a lot of traction, although wit ha lot of controversies attached to it. Zig seems to be doing well but the lack of progress towards v1.0 after all those years is quite concerning, making it looks more and more like a toy project rather than something serious. Odin seems to be flying under the radar of most people a bit too much. Jai will have John's name behind it and I am hearing a lot of praise from insiders(people in the beta program). As I said, I have no use for such languages but if i'll do in the future, I'd like to have a clear choice rather than myriad of languages in various stages of development, all trying to do the same thing.
If Jai is ever actually released to a meaningful amount of people I think we'll see just how little Blow's name means to people in practice. There is an artificial mystery around Jai right now and when the lid comes off the pot I think a lot of that is going to dissipate very fast.
With that said, I'll try it out. I'm not really impressed by what I've seen so far, though, it's very middle-of-the-pack with some really nonsense ideas. The possibility of easily creating your own checks with the compile-time machinery is potentially interesting but would probably turn into a nothingburger for us.
I think that's where most of this is at: After so many years of "waiting" (I think most people stopped actually waiting after a few years of mostly talking and very little actual productive doing) we'll end up with a very meh language that was touted as super special... And a painfully simple sokoban game that people are going to pretend is somehow super complex and hard to make.
Are you implying that Zig hasn’t been used in production? What about Tigerbeetle, Bun and Ghostty? I’m using Ghostty as my terminal right now.
I feel like Zig is aiming a lot higher. So that’s why it’s taking longer and also why people are more obsessed with it. The work on doing their own backend and incremental linker is impressive and interesting. So is their attempt at getting IO and async right.
