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0 pointsrc0011mo ago0 comments

Is Zig aiming to extend C or extinguish it? The embrace story is well-established at this point but the remainder is often unclear in the messaging from the community.

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PaulRobinson11mo ago

It's improved C.

C interop is very important, and very valuable. However, by removing undefined behaviours, replacing macros that do weird things with well thought-through comptime, and making sure that the zig compiler is also a c compiler, you get a nice balance across lots of factors.

It's a great language, I encourage people to dig into it.

dooglius11mo ago

Zig is open source, so the analogy to Microsoft's EEE [0] seems misplaced.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extingu...

rc00OP11mo ago

Open source or not isn't the point. The point is the mission and the ecosystem. Some of the Zig proponents laud the C compatibility. Others are seeking out the "pure Zig" ecosystem. Curious onlookers want to know if the Zig ecosystem and community will be as hostile to the decades of C libraries as the Rust zealots have been.

To be fair, I don't believe there is a centralized and stated mission with Zig but it does feel like the story has moved beyond the "Incrementally improve your C/C++/Zig codebase" moniker.

Zambyte11mo ago

> Curious onlookers want to know if the Zig ecosystem and community will be as hostile to the decades of C libraries as the Rust zealots have been.

Definitely not the case in Zig. From my experience, the relationship with C libraries amounts to "if it works, use it".

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ephaeton11mo ago

zig's C compat is being lowered from 'comptime' equivalent status to 'zig build'-time equivalent status. When you'll need to put 'extern "C"' annotations on any import/export to C, it'll have gone full-circle to C++ C compat, and thus be none the wiser.

andrewrk's wording towards C and its main ecosystem (POSIX) is very hostile, if that is something you'd like to go by.

yellowapple11mo ago

The goal rather explicitly seems to be to extinguish it - the idea being that if you've got Zig, there should be no reason to need to write new code in C, because literally anything possible in C should be possible (and ideally done better) in Zig.

Whether that ends up happening is obviously yet to be seen; as it stands there are plenty of Zig codebases with C in the mix. The idea, though, is that there shouldn't be anything stopping a programmer from replacing that C with Zig, and the two languages only coexist for the purpose of allowing that replacement to be gradual.

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