>If I may, my only piece of feedback (as someone who looked at Zig with fresh eyes) is that the syntax has lots of special chars (@, !void, .{}, &, etc). Is there a rationale published for these and other design choices (even if it's "I like it that way"). I would have expected a language with ambitious goals like Zig to take a stab at coming up with a grammar that's even simpler and cleaner than C.
That is sadly my gripe with a lot of the newer languages too. I have been looking for something to replace C for a long time, something that makes it easier to not shoot yourself in the foot. I just find most of them significantly less readable than C.
Rust seems to be going down the route of C++, hence I do not deem it a safe language at all, as I have an exceedingly hard time parsing the source and figuring out what is going on.
Zig is WAY better in that regard, but as OP mentions: all the special characters make things more difficult to parse. Calls like these (taken from the introduction page) contain so much visual clutter:
try expect(@call(.{}, add, .{3, 9}) == 12);
I sadly doubt any of this is possible to change at this stage anymore. Zig definitely seems the most promising C replacement with regards to tooling, especially cross compiling and C interop are a breeze.
Truly inspiring work!
The only new C-like language that really nailed it for me syntax wise would be Nim. Very clean and easy to reason about, which - from a programmer perspective - makes it exceedingly safe to program in. It just seemingly lacks most of the safety guarantees that the compilers of other, newer languages provide.
That is sadly my gripe with a lot of the newer languages too. I have been looking for something to replace C for a long time, something that makes it easier to not shoot yourself in the foot. I just find most of them significantly less readable than C.
Rust seems to be going down the route of C++, hence I do not deem it a safe language at all, as I have an exceedingly hard time parsing the source and figuring out what is going on.
Zig is WAY better in that regard, but as OP mentions: all the special characters make things more difficult to parse. Calls like these (taken from the introduction page) contain so much visual clutter:
I sadly doubt any of this is possible to change at this stage anymore. Zig definitely seems the most promising C replacement with regards to tooling, especially cross compiling and C interop are a breeze. Truly inspiring work!The only new C-like language that really nailed it for me syntax wise would be Nim. Very clean and easy to reason about, which - from a programmer perspective - makes it exceedingly safe to program in. It just seemingly lacks most of the safety guarantees that the compilers of other, newer languages provide.