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It’s surprising to me how much people seem to want async in low level languages. Async is very nice in Go, but the reason I reach for a language like Zig is to explicitly control those things. I’m happily writing a Zig project right now using libxev as my io_uring abstraction.

by pjmlp6 hours ago|

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Using async in low level languages goes all the way back to the 1960's, became common in systems languages like Solo Pascal, Modula-2, with Dr.Dobbs and The C/C++ User's Journal having plenty of articles regarding C extensions for similar purposes.

Hardly anything radical.

by hxtk5 hours ago|

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When I look at historical cases, it seems different from a case today. If I’m a programmer in the 60s wanting async in my “low level language,” what I actually want is to make some of the highest level languages available at the time even more high level in their IO abstractions. As I understand it, C was a high-level language when it was invented, as opposed to assembly with macros. People wanting to add async were extending the state of the art for high level abstraction.

A language doing it today is doing it in the context of an ecosystem where even higher level languages exist and they have made the choice to target a lower level of abstraction.

by melodyogonna10 hours ago|

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But Zig's async is being designed to enable this low-level control.

by epolanski6 hours ago|

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I am also positive, but when is the language going to hit a stable very LTS version that won't be touched for a long time?

If you want to compete with C, you can't do so without understanding that its stability and the developers focusing on mastering its practices, design, limitations, tooling has been one of the major successes.

by bastawhiz4 hours ago|

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> when is the language going to hit a stable very LTS version that won't be touched for a long time?

Is there any reason to be rushing it? Zig isn't languishing without activity. Big things are happening, and it's better in my opinion for them to get the big important stuff right early than it is to get something stable that is harder to change and improve later.

"Competing with C" means innovating, not striving to meet feature parity so it can be frozen in time. It's not as though C has anything terribly exciting going on with it. Let them cook.

by allthetime4 hours ago|

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There are so many other options available. If that is a concern, zig is not the answer now. Rushing to "LTS" would go completely against the ethos of constant experimentation and improvement that is and has been making zig great. C is 50 years old. Maybe give it a little time...