While I understand the reasoning, I think this is one of the most disappointing decisions by the Zig team.
One of the main reasons I took Zig seriously was their C interop story—as someone who loves C and dislikes almost every implementation of C interop and FFI I’ve used in other languages (Rust is a notable exception to this), I was pretty much sold on Zig when I was able to, in a total of < 3-ish hours, (1) implement a complete Zig wrapper over a C library I wrote without introducing any overhead, (2) build a Zig program using the wrapper, and (3) cross-compile the program, statically, producing single binaries for 5 different targets…Linux (amd64, arm64), macOS (amd64, arm64), and Windows (amd64), ALL from one laptop using a single Zig executable and some simple flags. This was C interop and productivity I’ve never experienced before.
I respect Andrew a lot (I think he’s pretty brilliant), so I hope this turns out to not be as bad as I think it’ll be for those of us who love Zig for what brings to the table for programmers who are biased toward C.
One of the main reasons I took Zig seriously was their C interop story—as someone who loves C and dislikes almost every implementation of C interop and FFI I’ve used in other languages (Rust is a notable exception to this), I was pretty much sold on Zig when I was able to, in a total of < 3-ish hours, (1) implement a complete Zig wrapper over a C library I wrote without introducing any overhead, (2) build a Zig program using the wrapper, and (3) cross-compile the program, statically, producing single binaries for 5 different targets…Linux (amd64, arm64), macOS (amd64, arm64), and Windows (amd64), ALL from one laptop using a single Zig executable and some simple flags. This was C interop and productivity I’ve never experienced before.
I respect Andrew a lot (I think he’s pretty brilliant), so I hope this turns out to not be as bad as I think it’ll be for those of us who love Zig for what brings to the table for programmers who are biased toward C.