Zig: A programming language designed for robustness, optimality, and clarity – Andrew Kelley
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN repeatedly recommends it as the definitive introduction to Zig straight from its author, and links to it whenever Zig's design choices come up.
What it is
Andrew Kelley, creator of Zig, introduces the language at the Recurse Center's Localhost series in 2018. He covers its goals of robustness, optimality and clarity, C interop, cross-compilation and explicit allocators.
Recommended by 6 HN commenters across 7 different months, 2018 to 2024.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec komuW · 2018-10 · on “Ask HN: What are some of the best technical talks you've heard?”
1. Why Do Keynote Speakers Keep Suggesting That Improving Security Is Possible? - James Mickens [LINK] 2. James Mickens on JavaScript - James Mickens [LINK] 3. Creating containers From Scratch - Liz Rice [LINK] 4. 2013 Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate: The Existence of Nothing - Panelists: J. Richard Gott, Jim Holt, Lawrence Krauss, Charles Seife, Eve Silverstein. Moderator: Neil deGrasse Tyson [LINK] 5. 2016 Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate: Is the Universe a Simulation? - Panelists: David Chalmers, Zohreh Davoudi, James Gates, Lisa Randall, Max Tegmark Moderator: Neil deGrasse Tyson [LINK] 6. Zig: A programming language designed for robustness, optimality, and clarity – Andrew Kelley [this video] 7. Co
Strong rec cellularmitosis · 2019-02 · on “Zig Is Great”
(and one continuous paragraph harms readability) edit: here's a great talk on zig from the recurse center: [this video]
Strong rec lsh · 2019-12 · on “Game Boy Advance “Hello World” Using Zig”
This is the introduction to Zig from the language author that I watched when it was first posted here a while ago: [this video] (good watch)
Recommends Boulth · 2018-05 · on “Big Integers in Zig”
Zig is really interesting, and the explicit allocators is a feature I miss in many other system languages (like Rust). Presentation by the Zig author is a good introduction to the concept [this video]
Recommends wlkr · 2018-06 · on “I Quit My Job to Live on Donations to Zig”
Looking for more on Zig I found a talk [0] (~1 hour) on the language by Andrew Kelley from just a few months ago. Edit: I see there already questions about Rust in this thread. There's an audience question on Rust in the talk [1] and the creator states that Rust is Zig's biggest competitor. [0] [this video] [1] [this video]
Recommends MaxBarraclough · 2018-09 · on “Zig 0.3.0 Released”
I don't know of an 'objective' thorough evaluation of Zig as it stands, but I hope these are of interest: Previous HackerNews discussion on Zig: [LINK] Also, perhaps not as objective as you'd like but still good resources: Whirlwind tour of the basic thinking behind Zig: [LINK] A ~50 minute talk on Zig, by its creator: [this video]
Recommends lsh · 2019-04 · on “Zig 0.4.0 Released”
The Zig language has a great premise, it's worth reading the above link or watching a bit of this video [this video] just to question our assumptions that certain language features need exist at all.
Cites MaxBarraclough · 2018-07 · on “Pointers Are More Abstract Than You Might Expect in C”
> I think there's room for other languages to occupy a similar space but they're need to focus on no-std-lib no-runtime operation (not always the sexiest target). You're describing the Zig language! It aims to be as fast as C, and unlike most languages that say this is a goal, it means it. There's no "almost as fast as C if you ignore the garbage-collector and the array-bounds-checking", it's actually as fast as C. Its author values the minimalism of C, but wants to create a far better language for doing that sort of work. [0] They're doing surprisingly well. They even managed to make a faster-than-C (faster even than hand-tuned assembly) SHA-2 [1] [0] [LINK] , [LINK] [1] [LINK] , it's also