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The Road to Zig 1.0 - Andrew Kelley

ChariotSolutions · 168K views · 2019-05-09 · 59:48

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Overview

Zig creator Andrew Kelley justifies why Zig exists and tours its distinctive features, including C interoperability and comptime, along with what people had built and what 1.0 would bring. It was given at Philly ETE 2019.

On Hacker News

HN treats it as the standard introduction to Zig by its creator, with some calling it among the best talks they have seen.

Recommended by 5 HN people across 6 months · HN mentions 2019–2025

Topics

C, C++, Rust, Go & systems languagesProgramming language design
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zigandrew kelleyc replacementcomptimesystems programming

What people said

pixelpoet · 2024-12 · Strong recommendation

Sorry, one more thing to add to this: Andrew Kelley is obviously a genius, and his talk introducing Zig[0] is in my top 10 of all time technical presentations, for many reasons. But I really do wish someone close to him with a passion for how coding is in many ways applied mathematics, would ask him to please have broader algebraic support for basic operations like +, -, * and maybe divide, with their basic dataflow characteristics. Optimal speed for complex numbers vs std::complex out of the box would be attractive. I understand his point about not wanting to allow every random C++ feature, but in these cases, it isn't a C++ feature, it's language-level basic algebra. In C++ land, ISPC[1] is often what you use when you want top speed rendering perf on SIMD CPUs, e.g. Moonray project[2] Please, just go ahead and define a nice clean API for vectors and scalars like OpenCL provides on its beautiful reference cards: [LINK] [0] [VIDEO] [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] Final edit sorry: in the end I love C++ and have been learning Rust mainly out of curiosity. Avoiding C++ quirks one can have few problems and a great time.

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matheusmoreira · 2023-11 · Strong recommendation

I can only hope my own language will become "incredibly small" like that one day. :) Even if a language doesn't take off, its ideas can make a difference and influence future designs. The creator of Zig certainly made an impression on me with this talk: [VIDEO] Even if Zig hadn't been successful, the ideas it represents would've enriched the world. Gives me hope I'll be able to make something out of my own ideas too one day.

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pixelpoet · 2023-07 · Strong recommendation

Andrew Kelley's intro[0] is probably the best talk I've ever seen, and his continuing leadership seems really great to me and worth supporting. Besides my reservations for its use in graphics programming (see my other comment) it looks very attractive in many practical ways (build system!! fuck CMake!) I could go from how I currently write my hobby code, sometimes a prototype for future commercial code. [0] [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by ChariotSolutions, played through YouTube.

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