zig is the future of programming. here's why. 

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You didn't even talk about one of the best features of Zig - seamless integration with C! It's really cool, you can straight import and start using C libs without writing any FFI.

After reading some of the comments my thought is "since when did programming languages become religions?"

Rust philosophy: make it hard to write bad code Zig philosophy: make it easy to write good code

If I didn't have Rust, I'd definitely be using Zig. For me, the philosophy behind Rust and Zig is what matters: we can make the compiler do more work for you, so why don't we? While I appreciate certain problems are so much easier to solve in Zig than in Rust, the stuff I write works really well in Rust, and it just clicks for me mentally.

Pros and cons of C: you can do what the hell you want

what alternate universe is this where C++ don't exist?

Zig makes low level development fun, accessible and productive

that rare thing - a youtuber prepared to admit that they changed their mind subbed

Finally you got zig-pilled :D One nitpick though: in zig defer operates on block scope, not function scope! Go's defer is function scope. Little, but important difference

My takeaway: Learn everything!

Let's all agree on the fact that Zig has by far the best build system. It is literally built into the language itself. No more bullshit Makefiles, pkgconf or Ninja. Don't even get me started with CMake.

One aspect of Zig I find so refreshing is how minimal it feels - you can comfortably go through the language documentation in a couple hours because there just isn't that much to learn. Zig comfortably gets so much done with comparably so few features.

Zig is definitely an amazing language, but there is so much you should have mentioned, maybe in another video, because as a C developer, Zig is really everything I wish C was. 1 - It's simple and easy to use. 2 - I'ts the most refactorable language (meaning you don't have to jump in 30 files fixing headers and function prototypes. 3 - Comptime is capturing 90% of the power of C++ templates/Macros, while still being very readable and type safe. 4 - The build system is insanely good, I replaced make/cmake with Zig, and with Zig itself it's really amazing. 5 - Zig found the right balance of freedom, meaning you can do exactly what you are doing in C (aka crazy casting and weird stuff unlike Rust) but at the same time the language design makes it very inconvenient and verbose to do so. Which makes it actually easier to just to the right thing and not take any shortcuts. So for once the Type system is actually one that doesn't deceive you because of how loose it is like C or how tight it is like Rust. 6 - Allocators are first class citizen. Even the Std is build around that which is amazing. I really don't get how a manual memory managed language like C didn't come with some form of interface for allocators. 7 - The interops with C is the most natural, intuitive, and straightforward that I've ever seen. You literally just add an @cImport("header.h"); and a exe.addCsourceFile("") in your build.zig and you are good to go. 8 - Zig also has integrated unit testing, which makes it so easier and cheaper to test code. In C I would literally spend 30 minutes writing some code and one hour testing it properly. In Zig you write a function write 2/3 tests forget about it and just do a quick zig build test and you are good to go. Which is also why it's so easy to refactor Zig btw. 9 - No hidden memory allocation, no hidden control flow, everything you read is everything you get, you don't have to guess whether this functions aborts, returns -1 or 0, or whether it sets ernno. 10 - The error handling and all the builting safety features makes it so much easier to write fast and correct code. I could go on an on but TLDR if you are a C developer you should definitely try Zig as I'm sure it's going to be the real C replacement. In System level programming.

Zig is nice.

Zig is the best C toolchain ever

Zig is for puppygirls, rust for catboys

as a beginner to programming, zig is my favourite out of all the languages i tried, i feel like i can read the standard library code and have an understanding of what its doing, unlike other low level languages where i cant comprehend anything others wrote , but the thing is , it feels like zig is dependant on C , you cant really do anything without importing a C library atleast from my prospective, also it feels like the community around it assumes everyone is coming from using C

At first, I was suspicious of Zig, thinking it was just another pointless endeavor. However, after giving it a try, I'm now addicted to it. I've been able to accomplish incredible things that I couldn't achieve with other languages

Zig makes 1000% more sense for game dev IMO ... Dont want to be worrying about Arc when I'm just trying to do stuff. Zig's "reflection" is also amazing for game dev stuff like network\io serialization, GUI etc

Nice video! Some good pros for Zig, and you didn't even get to its build system, which is arguably even more impressive in concept than the language itself.

When I get asked "What language should I learn?" I think the obvious answer should be C, because like you said the majority of systems is programmed in C and because Zig has still not reached 1.0 From my experience with Rust I can say that Rust FELT like a functional style programming language. It's focus on pattern matching, the immutability by default etc. It also has a lot of niceties of C++ (or some that C++ promised). But that means it also provides _some_ of the same footguns. Operator overloading, meaning that a line like a = b + c can be an unexpected heap allocation. I feel that Rust is the best language for programmers wanting system programming or high performance that come from functional languages or want many high level features. I feel Zig is closer to C than Rust is, like Zig has a "no hidden control flow" rule, it doesn't obfuscate how your data/ structs are on disk. I think it has a careful selection of features that make it nice to use for modern programmers. Especially: 1. An explicit error type, making it possible for a function to either return a value or an error, like you showed in the video. 2. A modern build system that doesn't depend on '#include's 3. Defer and what you didn't show errdefer. Making it easily possible to free resources on exit if an error ocurred. Formalizing the goto err pattern known from C. And being more powerful than Go's defer. 4. Very powerful tools to generate code and data structures at compile time. Even explicit loop unrolling with 'inline for' 5. Bounds checking and for loops over slices with a value and index My favorite feature is that alloc operations explicitly are an operation which can fail. Sure in most cases it's a hassle and I just bubble the error up but being able to properly react in the 5% of cases where I want to react to Out Of Memory situations feels very empowering. I think Zig has the possibility to become a very serious contender for the low latency, high performance and or system programming space, while I don't think it is taking many of Rusts users because of their different abstraction levels. But that depends on it becoming stable.

In May, there is "the software you can love" in Milan. They'll speak about zig and system programming! I already took the ticket!

"you should learn all the things" You know I'm not gonna do that, Ed.... my brain isn't big enough yet

technically, defer runs at the end of the current scope, not function scope. so if you have something like this: fn main() { { defer print("b"); print("a"); } print("c"); } you get this: a b c if it was at the end if the function it would be this: a c b if it ran at the end of the function scope rather than watever nested scope it's in, it would try to free a pointer that is out of scope, which doesn't work.

I have to think about the video "Interview with Senior Rust Developer in 2023" from "Programmers are also human", where he said "They don't like 'unsafe' in my code, so just stuff it into macros"

defer not only "places" the code at the end of the function, but at all exit points (if there is an early return for instance) like a destructor in C++. (and the futur defer statement in C hopefully)

Zig's purpose is not a thing because "Rust is too hard", since it sounds like you are uplifting Rust to a new high. Rust is too restrictive and inherently doesn't trust the developer to write good code, which sounds more like the reason why Zig is an alternative. Zig's purpose is to be a modern C, that's it. Complete control over memory with more easily usable features like error handling and perfect inter-operability with C. And also, Zig's standard library is insanely clear and accessible. You get it out of the box in plain Zig code and it can be one hell of a tutorial in the advanced Zig features if you study the implementation of everything.

I think Zig also fills another role : it's a better alternative to unsafe Rust. If I have a Rust function I'm about to mark as entirely unsafe, I think twice and rewrite it in Zig. I think unsafe Rust has more footguns than Zig does, and has a much clunkier syntax.

I love watching your videos but I feel this hatred for C++ that hurts. C++ is amazing then many of you can comprehend.

Thanks for the left!right idea for errors. Really helped me be able to read Zig better!

I'm glad that you came back after a bit of reanalysis ... Zig is shaping up to be all sorts of nice and I really appreciate your walkthrough, definitely opened my eyes! Thanks!

C++ is the best

I would also recommend Odin programming language, it is similar to zig yet feels different, people like using it for GUI applications, Game development,... The creator GingerBill is a friend of Andrew Kelly the zig creator, they influenced each other to make these languages what they are now.

Great video, I was just about to start my zig journey when I came across Odin. It's my first foray into low level/manual memory management and it's been really fun so far. I'd love to hear your thoughts on Odin as well.

Again with the fire videos!

quick mention to nim, optional gc, small binaries, and great interop with c code. great to look at, but struggles with a smaller community and worse documentation.

I hope you take a look at nim some day. Many of the zig features you've mentioned are also in nim, and it has many more that I would miss in zig. It's more high level than zig, but at the same time very low level when you need it to be.

Hello and greetings from a fellow low level programmer. How are you doing? I have spent close to a decade on assembly language programming of proprietary DSPs either directly or by way of analyzing cross-compiled disassembly. I really appreciate your efforts in educating the general public about low level coding. As we know it, it seems scary and may be it is to some extent, but its amazing with lots of scope for creativity.

im dipping into zig after 15ish years of c# and java. its definitely a weird switch but im eager to expand my skillset into systems level prog, even if i dont do it professionally

Nim is also a system's programming language with optional GC

Zig? For great justice, obviously.

I really love your cybersecurity stuff, it's the future, dude

Nice overview of zig. I never bothered to look into it before.

Is it just me or does it seem like Zig's syntax is weird for no reason? At 6:24 he mentions how you can think of running the openFile() function as going left or right. When you go left, the success result is put into f, but when you go right you catch the error value. So then why is the return type std.fs.File.OpenError!std.fs.File. Why is the right on the left and the left on the right?

Hold on, why are we not talking about C++? Did I miss something?

Another important thing to remember about Zig is that there are a lot of applications where completely memory-safe code simply isn't as important, and other concerns come first. An example I'm very familiar with is software video encoders; nearly all are written in C because the #1 concern is performance. Zig would make an ecosystem around developing one of these much more accessible, and give devs the tools they need to catch problems earlier & write code more quickly.

Been doing this a while - the only thing I'd automatically start in C is not a project, but a class of actual computer science students - for two reasons: 1) to later appreciate every other language and what they bring to the table; and 2) to have the beginnings of an understanding of how the machine works and a basis to read kernel code.

I mean, when talking about system languages saying that we are not going to talk about C++ in here is like saying "let's talk about GPUs, but not you NVIDIA" :)

can you put zig in the title please ? not everyone can see the thumbnail

Not doing dev anymore but coming from a VHDL, firmware, bootloader, kernel background and after just playing with the zigling "tutorial": this is the language I would have like to have during my low-level dev phase. It seems to make all the dangerous things quite visible and therefor controllable... I hope to see this language used more in the future (besides nim.... ;-) )

My favourite feature is comptime. You can run piece of code at compile time, and with this you can generate more complicated arrays of data.

Not gonna mention holy C or C+ :p

Regardless of what language is practical, they probably won't employ as much Zig programmers as C programmers for a long, long time.

As complete beginner in low level programming after high level on java and js it was really nice to program in zig, because its compiler says where I made a misstake, in C I just got error code and that's all. Also modern syntax feels refreshing and enjoyable.

Zig is an interesting option I really need to try out at some point, I've seen some interviews with the creator they make some really good points.

As a C++ dev, Rust sucks but Zig comes close to what modern C++ offers you without any bullshit.

Lol I want to know about c++

Not a big comment guy, but I just want to say, your presentation has got so good, some of your early videos sounded fascinating but were a bit jargon heavy. Now, frankly, I watch pretty much every LLL video that comes up in my feed even if I’m never gonna use them or maybe even never gonna understand 👏 👏 👏

I think the most uniquely-zig thing is payload capture. There are also, of course, comptime/defer/undefined/slices, but the truly innovative payload-capture invention deserves the chef's kiss.

I hate to be one of these people, but you should check out Odin if you haven't. It seemingly fits in a similar place as Zig, but with a completely different mindset. I like that in Odin, you have access to allocators and calling conventions, but they aren't forced on you; you can just call new and use the default allocator.

As much as I wanted to like Zig and use it as a C replacement I just couldn't. I found that it added "too much" to the language and had overly verbose syntax (I would rather just use Rust at that point). When I compared it to Odin, I found that Odin was just simpler overall while still giving the benefits that Zig has (no hidden allocations/manual allocators, range-based iteration, sized arrays, better error handling, etc). Zig definitely has a lot more momentum behind it now with the release of tools like Bun but I would really like the ecosystem with the better tooling (especially the LSP), MUCH simpler syntax, builtin linear algebra, and a style that feels like what C++ *should* have been to take off

I'm totally in love with Nim, but Zig looks great.

can you change code theme when presenting? that red text is hard to see on the background color. at least for me since i'm a bit colorblind

it really depends on what domains you want to work on: embedded systems: zig games: zig webdev: zig os: zig c: zig networking: zig automation: zig

Would be cool if you checked out Odin as well. Its quite similar to Zig but in my opinion more ergonomic/readable and at least on the language side more mature. Doesnt have as much traction and a smaller community tho.

I'd love to see more zig content, maybe a video comparing zig to cmake or premake for building large c(++) projects

I really like the concept of comptime in zig. It seems really powerful

"we will not talk about C++" yeah lets ignore one language in systems programming/gamedev that you can actually find a job with

immediately puts bias on display to bash C++ yet the entirety of the SerenityOS is written in C++, which is moving along at a rather rapid pace and is already branching out to include support for ARM and RISC-V, IOW C++ by explicit illustration is a perfectly capable systems programming language

I haven't tried Zig before, but I have tried Rust and wrangling with the borrow checker is SO FRUSTRATING!!! Zig, which doesn't have a borrow checker, seems like it lowers the barrier to entry for a modern C alternative, making it easy to write fast but safe code.

As a Java programmer I'm mot a fan of forced exception handling. I'd rather have the choice to not do it, or not do it right then and there. Java has evolved and the standard api is also moving away from checked exceptions in lots of cases. Having it in the signature of the function like zig has looks quite neat. Will surely look into it.

Is Zig suitable as a first programming language? Is it worth investing your time in it?

ZIG ONTOP!

”Learning is how you become a better person”. Love it!

I adore it and I see it as definite language for new “C” projects. And definitely great no awesome for embedded. And C developers will build so much faster in Zig than Rust.

Why not C++? I'm just curious, is it actually that problematic like the "blow the entire leg off" meme?

I'm genuinely curiously, why won't you even get into C++? As someone who learned C then Rust and is now learning C++ - I don't understand all the hate. Subjectively, I don't think it is that bad. Sure you can shoot yourself in the foot, but that's not easier than in C. As I'm doing scientific computing, I find C++ is often more flexible and adaptable for my use cases. I don't have enough experience with Zig to have any opinion on it except it looks cool, but not ready for use yet.

Good explanation.

thanks for the sober security vid

zig, zig, zig

How does Zig compare to Odin in your opinion? (PS: I'm a Rust fan-boy.)

Hey, I'm thinking about learning C to build my own data structures and algorithms, plus get into some networking (like TCP and chat apps), and maybe touch on graphics with OpenGL or something like that. I want to grasp some fundamental skills that you don't usually see in JavaScript or PHP projects. Also, I’m curious about how rendering works and want to get more into algorithms. Do you think Zig might be a better choice for diving into this stuff instead of C?

I really like the idea of Zig, but coming from a JS and Rust background, I found it really hard to work with. Maybe it's because I'm running on Windows, but it seemed like a lot of the examples I found online required a lot of workarounds (or were simply out of date) and a lot of the docs were missing critical info to get over those roadbumps.

seeing people say whatever about c++ most of the time makes me think whats wrong with my car cause i like it

The C++ answer to all of the features mentioned here: Allocator: fully supported by all stl containers Defer: RAII (destructor) Error as value: C++ std::expect + setting compiler flag for checking switch case missing case Out of bounds check: use .at to access containers, or wrap raw buffer into span and then use .at

One of the few sublime text users that are left, Respect!

He forgot to mention Nim as a language that uses no garbage collection.

How Zig compares to Odin?

I am reasonably good with C but not with C++ and I was wondering if I should rather a) hone my C++ or b) learn Rust

beyond the eloquent and coherent explanations, above all i most liked your comment that we should all be learning everything, becuase learning makes us not only better programmers, but also better people. i whole heartedly agree.

I see Zig mostly as a "TypeScript for C" and it's been very nice to work with it with that mindset. I import C libraries like raylib and just use Zig for my code.

Why does this guy hate C++ so much lmao

The defer keyword is a cool idea- easy to use and easy to implement if scoping is already in place.

It's one thing for Zig to improve and modernize C whilst still keeping the language small and lean, that would make it a great lang on its own. But then comptime... honestly its the best approach to generics I've seen, and it happened by accident! Best lang 10/10

CompTime is also a pretty sick feature. You could have a function that creates an array with the 1 million first prime numbers and have it be computed at compile time instead of runtime

3:01 I believe C++ fits in the middleground too. Many people just have a religious attitude towards it because it is very full and complex. (I guarantee that most avid C++ haters have never even touched it’s surface.) If you write modern C++ with reasonably good practises, memory safety is not that difficult. Most of the time you don’t even need to allocate and free memory because things like smart pointers and std::string hide that away.

Zig allowed me to learn and understand rust. Having explicit heap allocations really lets people that come from garbage collected languages learn how memory is actually allocated and cleaned up without having to dive into C which... for someone unfamiliar is just a whole mess of nope.

I’m waiting for zag.

Zig exists to write Bun, obv