"I Am Sorry" - Zig 0.11.0 Release | Prime Reacts

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Article Link: ziglang.org/news/0.11.0-postp...
Written by: Andrew Kelley | andrewkelley.me/
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[@SundaraRamanR]

Andrew is a model for honest, civil developer communication, that a lot of other projects could learn from. No weasel words, no hiding behind PR speak, just "here's what we wanted to do, here's why it didn't happen, sorry". His handling of the "divorce from LLVM" issue getting on Hacker News and people brigading the thread was great to see as well. He explained their misunderstanding, reassured the people who were actually worried while completely ignoring the flamebaits and trolls, exactly the right way to handle it.

[@IStMl]

looking at you Rust

[@_kurohana]

​@@IStMlI think that's the risk of being popular, the more people are interested in the project the more people you may disappoint with any decision. Zig has a different governance model and different values (I think Andrew said he refuses to have any organization in the board of directors to prevent big tech from influencing the language) so they may avoid some of the Rust issues

[@ivlis.w8630]

I really loved the explanation, simple and straight to the point, like "Hey, I know we expected to have this, some things messed up, this is my fault, but these are the reasons why I'm still doing a release, and we are still in progress of developing those features for the next one, stay tuned"

[@ivlis.w8630]

​@@_kurohana I think the problem isn't that much with being popular, since it could be useful to know you are doing something right But then it's your job as a leader to take the feedback and make the right choice, knowing you'll always disappoint someone

[@raianmr2843]

​@@_kurohana sometimes all a project needs is a daddy figure 😭

[@colin_actually]

I just love that C++ frustration -> Zig journey. Mad respect.

[@batatanna]

I think every single language was born from c++ frustration

[@zocker1600]

@@batatanna > I think every single language was born from c++ frustration Yes and yet they all suck at actually replacing C++ and mostly focus on improving one specific aspect of C++ while making other things worse.

[@101Mant]

​@@zocker1600I was literally talking with my boss tofay how nobody in our company uses C++ anymore. C++ used to get used for writing lots of desktop apps as there were few other options but it's largely been replaced with more modern languages. It's main advantage used to be if you cared about performance but now there is rust for that. It mostly gets used for legacy reasons, some library or engine you have to use needs it.

[@xevious4142]

Also why go exists lol

[@arthurpenndragon6434]

@@zocker1600 eh, go is pretty "safe" all around, no radical move-fast-break-things changes fundamentally, does a good job. only major difference is the tiny keyword vocabulary, which is definitely an all-around improvement.

[@djupstaten2328]

Bethesda: "We have to postpone the release of an underwhelming game one year although we are a whole corporation that have released but 3 games in ten years, if you could call them that" Ziglang-1: "I may have to delay the release of this entire language two weeks"

[@ThePrimeTimeagen]

andrew k respect

[@k98killer]

The best example I've seen in a while of congratulations/I'm sorry.

[@ThePrimeTimeagen]

I glide across the internet to find the best

[@Hobbitstomper]

I'm learning Rust now, so that in 4 years when I finally become efficient in it, Zig 1.0 will be released and the entire industry moves to Zig, just so that I can spend another 4 years learning Zig.

[@RoyalVideoPresents]

I think everything you learned from Rust, you can apply on some level in Zig. For example, even though there is no borrow checker, upholding the rules it put in your head will make your zig code better in my opionion.

[@jcbritobr]

That will never happen. In 4 years rust will get even more adoption than today(and even today is high adoption). Products needs the correct time window to be suceeded. Zig lost that window.

[@aperson4051]

​@@jcbritobrzig also has to offer enough incentive to overcome the burden of a poorer ecosystem and fewer correctness guarantees than rust. For the majority of projects that could be written in either rust or zig, rust will still be a better option. Zig is maybe a C killer, but no more, IMO

[@charliegnu]

The whole industry won't move to Zig but when 1.0 comes and you are proficient in Rust, you'll be able to learn it in a few days.

[@DataPastor]

@@jcbritobror Rust becomes the new Scala. The hype fades away, and developers will turn towards easier to use languages, let them be Zig, Mojo, Carbon or any other.

[@Pariatech]

Hyped for the release. I need to pull the latest changes and rebuild my zig install. Love my zig

[@dummypg6129]

And so again, Fireship released ZIG 100Seconds... i feel there is really a dev cult over here. lol jk

[@jcfawerd]

It feels like the cult of Rust, although I did write Rust sometimes, I don't get the hype and the urgency to rewrite everything in rust

[@tonyhart2744]

@@jcfawerd initially rewrite in rust is just a meme and many people take the joke very seriously

[@emptydata-xf7ps]

“What do think 10K lines of code?”.. clicks link… **Ad** damn you!

[@ThePrimeTimeagen]

gotem... got me? wtf

[@SamArmstrong-DrSammyD]

I'll take every one of those features over async await any day.

[@JohnWilliams-gy5yc]

The c++ "sender" async api has been slated to c++26. I'd like to see any other languages implement this before 2026. It's still debatable between async/await and sender which one can be read faster.

[@embeddor3023]

It's kinda funny how people (mostly non-C++ devs) keep saying C++ has too many features where C++ still lacks too many important features such as reflection, standard networking, standard multiprocessing, pattern matching, this sender async thing, etc...

[@zocker1600]

@@embeddor3023 I would disagree with "C++ lacks many important features". I think the core issue is that the C++ stdlib just sucks and managing third party lib also sucks. (CMakeList.txt lol in what year are we wtf)

[@TheMrKeksLp]

@@embeddor3023 To be fair most people complain about the clusterfuck and footgun minefield that these many features create not about the existance about the features themselves

[@4cps777]

@@embeddor3023 yeah, but how many other languages have constraints and triple comparison operators as well?

[@embeddor3023]

@@4cps777 from the top of my head, I would say most of them. Java's and Rust's generics have the ability to specify type constraints. Java has the .compare() method which is very similar to the threeway comparison from C++.

[@anon-fz2bo]

part of the reason i like the language is coz of the guy who invented it. seems like a genuine dude.

[@dmitriyobidin6049]

No. Triple A game would be released in current state with roadmap to patch bugs later.

[@GreyDeathVaccine]

....Cyberpunk 2077 :D

[@dylanmeeks54]

I feel like I’ve seen this before. Maybe I watched it live on twitch like you all should

[@sonofabippi]

It's funny, we're talking about Zig which put me into 'C' land and when I heard Prime say 'threads' I thought of 'pthreads' and I just about smashed my laptop. Pthreads was a whole library of footguns. OH...OH... the other threads.

[@worldadmin9811]

That August 3rd mentioned is today btw

[@ThePrimeTimeagen]

oh, nice!

[@danhugo]

Own your brand, don´t hand it over to Twitter/X/whatever… self-publish, 100% support that (oh, and launching a better C, who wants to deal with 3rd party platform drama when making the world a better place is on the front burner).

[@heroe1486]

Yeah but you gotta start somewhere, SEO being what is these days

[@ivlis.w8630]

Yeah.. that's cool, but if you're running a proyect and want to get to most people you kind of require some popular social media, at least to say "Hey, new post in my blog!"

[@danhugo]

@@ivlis.w8630 This rationalization is self-contracting, especially if we are engaging developers.

[@danhugo]

@@heroe1486 So be lazy.

[@HyperCodec]

isnt this a repost of a previous vid? edit: oh lmao i forgot i was attending the stream that's why i have deja vu

[@ThePrimeTimeagen]

I guess in some sense it is a repost

[@gitgudchannel]

..JUST ..TWO ..MORE ..WEEKS

[@kissuosts4704]

I know that feel

[@colin_actually]

Well at least it's not Rust drama.

[@kubre]

Threads userbase is Instagram users which is there and enjoying it but people using Twitter most of them will stay on Twitter

[@MegaMech]

I've reviewed way bigger PRs. Tbf, most of it was removing tailing spaces

[@pylotlight]

Is this video a rerelease? Isn't this content a couple weeks old?

[@programaths]

What is Twitter ? Is that an old thing?

[@PinakiGupta82Appu]

You spoke your mind with full honesty. I appreciate that. There are many aspects of Zig and Rust that will not make them to be true successors of anything, that's just my thoughts. A good LSP will be nice to have for Zig. And, Social media. It's the worst part of the internet, at least to me. Everything can be used for doing something good. However, people are not on social media for that. Good day!

[@Sam-dh7fr]

rip paragraph

[@posteisnoob5763]

Where audio

[@muadrico]

I am looking into Zig also at the moment. What I think is, that better error messages, e.g. with suggestions would improve the learning experience a lot.

[@mgord9518]

After using Zig for the last 6 months or so, the error messages are my only serious qualm with it. They're constantly getting better, but a lot of the time they can still be pretty cryptic at times -- especially for beginners. Other than that, it's a pretty incredible language.

[@phazechange3345]

@@mgord9518 FWIW, the zig developers also know that the errors need some work. Working on those is planned, but it's just not the priority. There's actually a lot of those issues within the language, including capitalization consistency, function verb consistency, etc. They're acknowledged as a problem, but also probably won't be addressed till 1.0 or even 1.1 by design.

[@michaelucho]

Will Zig be the new programming language that will take the world by storm or just be another flash in the pan ? Only time will tell . CoffeeScript anyone?

[@homelessrobot]

Who cares? Apparently everyone, i have no idea why though.

[@NoX-512]

Probably.

[@nessundorma2232]

Yoink

[@SplittingField]

You do post on the other platform if you want to funnel your followers there.

[@ThePrimeTimeagen]

huh?

[@SplittingField]

@@ThePrimeTimeagen Just a reply on why someone moving to threads, for example, would continue posting on Twitter.

[@SundaraRamanR]

How does the actual funneling happen though? I've seen people double post to Twitter and Mastodon and say "follow me on Mastodon" - but why would anyone make that effort if you're posting at both places?

[@prgnify]

@@SundaraRamanR If you are mirroring your posts and only mirroring, you show that you are not consuming anything from the platform - so as soon as someone needs to reach you they may make the effort. I'm not saying this has worked for Mastodon x Twitter or other alternatives in this space specifically, but this is the logic of how this works. Also, there are many other problems with Mastodon and Blueskies and Threads etc, I'm not here to push for a migration from or to any of those.

+30k, -30k. So, 0 lines changed in the end, right?

[@romangeneral23]

Pretty much...

[@MH_VOID]

reminds me of the story of the dev whose company required everyone to submit the number of lines of code they wrote every month. He spent a month refactoring a big program, removing 15_000 lines of code, and writing 6_000 to replace it. He put -9000 on his submission. The company soon stopped with the requirement. (I don't remember the exact numbers, so these could very well be quite wrong)

[@carminator12]

When you change a(n existing) line of code, even for a single character, it count as a removed line and a added line at the same time so both counters get a +1. I don't know how it goes for companies that count with it. But line change measuring can hide very different things. Adding a non-code (like markdown) file can add a lot of lines quickly. Adding a feature add lines quickly too and not necessarily for big works. Rework on features or refactoring code increase line's changes. And a last one here, fixing a bug can requiert few to sometime a single line of code to change, but those counters don't witness the burden of investigation and testing that resulted in this change. When I think about a project lifecycle, adding feature, refactor and fix (maintenance) it remind of me the Pareto principle. So I think even if it's pretty "graphical" the line's count reflect poorly what kind of work where done.

[@romangeneral23]

@@MH_VOID LOVE IT

[@electrolyteorb]

WILL NETFLIX BE COMPLYING WITH THE NEW WEB DRM(WEB INTEGRITY API)????

[@ThePrimeTimeagen]

i don't know

[@electrolyteorb]

@@ThePrimeTimeagen ... which obviously translates to: "we would have no problem doing it... Duh"🙄

[@SundaraRamanR]

​@@electrolyteorbgood job extracting a confession from this dastardly villain. Mr. Prime - CEO and sole Board Director and BDFL and God Emperor of Netflix - tried to hide it from you, but you figured it out using your massive brain.

[@electrolyteorb]

@@SundaraRamanR oh yeah, maybe, but why would a company like Netflix would any problem implementing any kind of DRM. I mean, Netflix runs ON that. Also why anyone at Netflix or the proposed "attesting companies" would have any problem killing the almost-open web, as we know it?

[@AK-vx4dy]

Prime make Call Of Duty for developers wich can help Andrew. Maybe not all here are professional TypeScript-ers :P

[@MelroyvandenBerg]

No no. No Twitter

[@user-cx6ec2kp6u]

The way you always highlight one letter off from each side of a sentece drives me insane. NBF

[@MH_VOID]

"NBF" = ?

[@origamitraveler7425]

Nackus Baur Form

[@ostrava_]

I'm disappointed you didn't say "the zig-eagen"

[@kossnocorp]

Appreciate the energy, but I wish half the videos about Zig wasn’t rage about Twitter. I just don’t get it. Reminds me of a drunk grandpa at a family dinner.

[@ok-tr1nw]

(response to the twitter rant) Doesnt matter uncle prime, rss is better than those

[@petenilson]

wtf is twitter

[@NoX-512]

A blue bird? I don’t know.

[@1Caja]

*X*

[@heroe1486]

Mid 2023 Zoomers

[@whywhatwherein]

The term Mastodong feels a bit aggressive. Fosstodon is cool

[@willemidaho]

Based Twitter take.

[@NoX-512]

Andrew is the real genius. Tom is just a poser.

[@KyleLuce]

30k lines.....? Nope lol 😂

[@ABHISHEKSINGH-nv1se]

It's better to take time to release new features with some thoughts than releasing half baked buggy and bad designed feature.

[@carriagereturned3974]

successor to C that did not 1.0'ed, YET.

[@Z3r0XoL]

rust is great and all, but zig is the future of c

[@captainfordo1]

I see Zig is an alternative, not a replacement, for C, though I personally have no interest in alternatives because C suits my needs well. Learning it has made me a far better programmer, and I have gotten to the point where I'm comfortable building my own QOL features, like count-based strings and generic data structures. It is the perfect language for game and systems programming.

[@raffimolero64]

Try out some weird paradigms some time. Try some assembly, or some haskell, or some lisp, or some weird esoteric programming language. Build a sorting algorithm or Conway's Game of Life in them. Try enough of them and you'll take what sticks and throw what doesn't. Trying out Zig is only a less outlandish version of this suggestion :P

[@captainfordo1]

@@raffimolero64 not interested. I would rather focus on learning programming instead of learning different languages and paradigms. If that excites you, awesome. But what excites me more is learning low-level concepts, such as in game development. And C is the best tool for that job in my opinion. (Obviously Assembly too, as reading disassembly is useful for optimization)

[@mgord9518]

@@captainfordo1 How do you know what the best tool for the job is if you're not interested in trying out other tools?

[@Rakkoonn]

I somewhat agree, but that only works for solo projects. The problem is building your own QoL features doesn't really work when you're working on a big team or going between companies. Everyone will have done it differently, while with Zig you have a single easy way that everyone uses.

[@captainfordo1]

@@mgord9518couldn’t be bothered. C has what I need. My goal is not to learn programming languages

[@13zebras]

He can't be on Twitter, but maybe he can be on "X". ;)

[@NoX-512]

Is that a new reality show? 🤔

[@eduardabramovich1216]

Time to move to Odin

[@jeezusjr]

We have more programming languages than Javascript frameworks. Zig is good, but segfaults make me sad so it's not for me. I cannot wait til Mojo is released properly.

[@justaskaulakis8202]

First and fast

[@_akiraff]

UwU

[@ryshask]

holy cow... Dude couldn't open a file in C++ and now he's creating languages? sheesh.... Explains a lot.

[@_kurohana]

I think you missed the part where it says "14 years 11 months ago"

[@NoX-512]

Exactly. He never learned how to open a file in C++. That’s why he’s creating Zig. He just want to be able to open files.

[@gestaltengine6369]

Just double click it, what's the problem

[@romangeneral23]

If you can't open a C++ file with notepad or hell notepad++. Then you have bigger problems to deal with first.

[@sanderbos4243]

Not sure whether you're referring to Andrew's StackOverflow post from 15 years ago, but he was asking how to let his *C++ program* open a file.

[@romangeneral23]

​@@sanderbos4243oooooooh. Then I take it back then! Yeah that is pretty frustrating...

[@SundaraRamanR]

If you aren't born with all existing programming knowledge already crammed into your brain, are you even a Real Programmer™️?

[@TheMrKeksLp]

@@sanderbos4243 Even further he was asking how to open a file idiomatically

[@raianmr2843]

​@@SundaraRamanR Actually the real concerning thing here is that some like you aren't aware of how big of a clusterfuck c++'s file io api(s) are. But I guess you've bigger things to worry about if you really think seeking programming knowledge is a sign of weakness 😂

[@thingsiplay]

Zig as C replacement. Rust as C++ replacement. Go as Python replacement. Edit: I changed my initial comment, because Go isn't well suited as C replacement with it's garbage collection.

[@zyriab5797]

C as C replacement

[@TheMrKeksLp]

@@zyriab5797 Windows 95 as Windows 95 replacement

[@MH_VOID]

Rust, Zig, and Nim were my old trifecta I wanted to use for everything. Now, it's basically just Rust and ZSH, with the occasional Python hacking. Also Elisp of course, for Emacs. Rust is great, but sometimes I really just want the blissful simplicity of C, to just forget about fighting the language, and chuck pointers and manipulate bits and GSD. The thing about C, and really also JavaScript, is that you just can't really get away from them. You kinda need to use and actively interact with them, unlike e.g. Go and C++, which I can mostly avoid (though not so much for C++ in e.g. the game development space). That'll probably change for JavaScript relatively soon, as WASM becomes better, but C, how can it ever be replaced anytime soon? People'll probably still need to know it in 50 years.

[@thingsiplay]

@@MH_VOID It's not really replacing the language or any of the legacy code. Off course C will be important in the future. The way people say being a replacement is either a joke or they mean an alternative that can be used in place of. At least that's how I understand it. I have looked at Nim too. Maybe that is a viable option too, I don't know right now. But realistically speaking, Nim is not that popular like the other alternatives. I hope WASM will take off in a way like JavaScript did.

[@captainfordo1]

Zig is not a C replacement are you kidding?