HackerTube.dev

[#36] Zig Roadmap 2024 - Andrew Kelley

Zig SHOWTIME · 66.1K views · 2024-01-26 · 1:00:23

Open on YouTube ↗

If playback is restricted in your region, try opening the original video. Use Mark watched to add it to your marked videos.

Overview

Andrew Kelley's 2024 Zig roadmap talk, followed by a Q&A, covers the language's priorities and the state of the project. Topics include compilation speed, moving off LLVM toward a self-hosted toolchain, async, and the path to 1.0.

On Hacker News

HN points to it as the authoritative source on Zig's direction, especially why async was removed and why the toolchain is changing.

Recommended by 1 HN people across 1 months · HN mentions 2024–2025

Topics

Search by tags

What people said

TwentyPosts · 2024-02 · Recommendation

Check out the Q&A in this video to hear it from the man himself, it's the first question: [VIDEO] The tl;dr is: "The previous async approach ended up not working, and had to be removed. It's currently an incredibly hard problem with no clear rodemap. The plan is to get there eventually."

Read the original HN comment ↗
eddythompson80 · 2025-07 · Reference

Zig has a pretty well documented 1.0 goals. It was the first thing I heard about zig from Andrew about. [VIDEO]

Read the original HN comment ↗
pbaam · 2025-01 · Reference

Well, if your compilations turn to be submilisecond it's not an implementation detail :) *. As of now it is only supported for x86_64 Linux (only ELF format) and it has some bugs; incremental compilation is in its very early stages. Andrew talked about it in the 2024 roadmap video[1] why they are digging so low on the multiplatform toolchain (for besides incremental compilation): - Fast build times (closely related to IC, but LLVM gives very slow development iterations, even for the compiler development) - Language innovations: besides IC, async/await is a feature Andrew determined to not be feasable to implement with LLVM's coroutines. Async will likely not make it into 1.0, as noted in the 0.13 release notes. It is not discarted yet but neither is it the priority. - There are architectures that don't work very well on LLVM: SPARC and RISC-V are the ones I remember My personal point is that a language that is meant to compete with C cannot have a hard dependency on a C++ project. That, and that it's appealing to have an alternative to LLVM whenever you want to do some JIT but don't want to bring a heavy dependency [1] [VIDEO] * There is also the `--watch` flag for `zig build` which re-runs every step (IC helps) everytime a file is saved. [edit: formatting]*

Read the original HN comment ↗

Sources

Video by Zig SHOWTIME, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

HN summaries and labels may contain AI errors. HN dates refer to discussions, not video publication.

HN Library: HackerTube export (2026-10-31) and open-index/hacker-news. Upstream summaries and classifications may contain AI errors.

Views, duration and playback status refresh separately from the published catalog. When an update fails, existing data remains visible.

Selection checks
  • SaaS & AI candidates: Topic keywords do not match
  • Editor-approved picks: Editorial review is required

Rule matches identify candidates. They do not guarantee video quality or financial results.

About the library and its sources