> I love Zig for it's verbosity.
I love Zig too, but this just sounds wrong :)
For instance, C is clearly too sloppy in many corners, but Zig might (currently) swing the pendulum a bit too far into the opposite direction and require too much 'annotation noise', especially when it comes to explicit integer casting in math expressions (I wrote about that a bit here: https://floooh.github.io/2024/08/24/zig-and-emulators.html).
When it comes to performance: IME when Zig code is faster than similar C code then it is usually because of Zig's more aggressive LLVM optimization settings (e.g. Zig compiles with -march=native and does whole-program-optimization by default, since all Zig code in a project is compiled as a single compilation unit). Pretty much all 'tricks' like using unreachable as optimization hints are also possible in C, although sometimes only via non-standard language extensions.
C compilers (especially Clang) are also very aggressive about constant folding, and can reduce large swaths of constant-foldable code even with deep callstacks, so that in the end there often isn't much of a difference to Zig's comptime when it comes to codegen (the good thing about comptime is of course that it will not silently fall back to runtime code - and non-comptime code is still of course subject to the same constant-folding optimizations as in C - e.g. if a "pure" non-comptime function is called with constant args, the compiler will still replace the function call with its result).
TL;DR: if your C code runs slower than your Zig code, check your C compiler settings. After all, the optimization heavylifting all happens down in LLVM :)
I love Zig too, but this just sounds wrong :)
For instance, C is clearly too sloppy in many corners, but Zig might (currently) swing the pendulum a bit too far into the opposite direction and require too much 'annotation noise', especially when it comes to explicit integer casting in math expressions (I wrote about that a bit here: https://floooh.github.io/2024/08/24/zig-and-emulators.html).
When it comes to performance: IME when Zig code is faster than similar C code then it is usually because of Zig's more aggressive LLVM optimization settings (e.g. Zig compiles with -march=native and does whole-program-optimization by default, since all Zig code in a project is compiled as a single compilation unit). Pretty much all 'tricks' like using unreachable as optimization hints are also possible in C, although sometimes only via non-standard language extensions.
C compilers (especially Clang) are also very aggressive about constant folding, and can reduce large swaths of constant-foldable code even with deep callstacks, so that in the end there often isn't much of a difference to Zig's comptime when it comes to codegen (the good thing about comptime is of course that it will not silently fall back to runtime code - and non-comptime code is still of course subject to the same constant-folding optimizations as in C - e.g. if a "pure" non-comptime function is called with constant args, the compiler will still replace the function call with its result).
TL;DR: if your C code runs slower than your Zig code, check your C compiler settings. After all, the optimization heavylifting all happens down in LLVM :)