> It's not better-enough to motivate switching away from C in places where C is still used
I suspect zig will eventually fill this niche. Proper arrays and strings and better compile time execution support while still being a small, simple, explicit language are quite significant improvements on C.
But why wouldn't I use Rust in those scenarios, which gives me even more safety & compile-time bug checking? Zig isn't actually a small or simple language, after all, that's just marketing bullshit. Manual, mostly unassisted memory management isn't simple, and compile time evaluation & reflection isn't small. It keeps making claims about being simpler because it doesn't have macros or metaprogramming, but that's incredibly deceptive at best since it does have compile-time code generation (aka, metaprogramming). It's how Zig's printf function works! https://ziglang.org/documentation/0.7.1/#Case-Study-printf-i...
And as a bonus Rust includes a package manager today, instead of a coming eventually promise. So I'm not seeing why I'd ever go with Zig over Rust if I was migrating off of C today?
> Zig isn't actually a small or simple language, after all, that's just marketing bullshit. Manual, mostly unassisted memory management isn't simple, and compile time evaluation & reflection isn't small. It keeps making claims about being simpler because it doesn't have macros or metaprogramming, but that's incredibly deceptive at best since it does have compile-time code generation (aka, metaprogramming).
As VP of marketing bullshit I recommend you double check your source of information as we never claimed that Zig has no metaprogramming, in fact comptime is mentioned on the front page of the official Zig website and the codesample on the right of it shows comptime metaprogramming too.
That said, is you need something stable today, then Rust is undoubtedly the better choice.
It think zig makes quite a bit of sense for micro-controllers where you need really precise control of things, avoid lots of bugs simply by having all memory statically allocated, and you need to do a lot of unsafe bit twiddling anyway to interact with hardware.
Zig won't dis-allow any correct programs, zig would compile faster, and zig does appear to be simpler even though in principle you could come across specific zig programs that aren't simple due to doing crazy metaprogramming.
If I imagine a world where Zig is 1.0, and has the same tooling/ecosystem as Rust, and I want to make a single player game from scratch, I would probably pick Zig over Rust, and Zig over C or C++.
I suspect zig will eventually fill this niche. Proper arrays and strings and better compile time execution support while still being a small, simple, explicit language are quite significant improvements on C.