In some ways it always has been, the community was 'born' in the middle of the pandemic, then for a long time there was a constant influx of Rust zealots coming into threads about Zig to remark how immoral it is to use Zig, and now LLM shovel sellers are telling everybody that the only way forward is to become efficient at consuming tokens.

But it's actually not that bad.

The Zig community is growing pretty well, useful software is being written in Zig, and the advantages that Zig brings are still valid whether you hand-code or use LLMs (e.g. cross-compilation of C/C++ code).

The question is why would you fare any better if you don't use it. I don't know how it will play out, but this much I know: I will never pay for AI music, because I can replicate it for free. I'm still buying music from real musicians (in fact tons more than ever before), because I can't. Similarly, I have contributed to many FOSS projects (both financially and in PRs), but will not (knowingly) do the same for the ones that are vibecoded. Whether that will amount to anything or is just a fart in the wind, we'll see.

zig is reasonably established. the llms write pretty good zig. see project linked below which is almost entirely llm-written

> And it is going to be very hard to justify choosing Zig for your sloppy-but-functional AI-written code

why? because one project that was shipping fast made a dog's breakfast of it?

> why open yourself up to memory unsafety on top of everything else?

this can be addressed by third parties in the reasonable near-term. for example:

https://github.com/ityonemo/clr

the zig team says that in the future stabilizing the IR and providing an API will happen.

fwiw in the process of building this project the llms have never once written a memory safety error in the "lib" section (in the src section there was a lot of tripping over segfaults since memory mapping datatypes accessed by a dylib can get hairy)

And as always, the response you'll hear is: but AI sucks/hallucinates/could never replace me etc... Just look at the progress LLM'S have made in the past few years, and extrapolate that to the next 10 or 20 years. I don't see how Zig makes sense if this is the trajectory the industry is going.

Meanwhile, some projects are doing the opposite, like going from Rust to Zig, here's an example from a podcast I recently listened to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSXGf3oN2yU

Here's the project in question: https://github.com/roc-lang/roc

I think Bun just got a lot of visibility because of the speed and scope of the migration, which both shook things up and I guess was good PR cause that made a lot of headlines.

You either care about non-functional aspects of your code, or you don't. Running your code through the shredder that destroys everything you don't test while insisting on writing it on a language that specifies non-functional properties... I don't have any other word, it's stupid.

2. You can write memory safe code in C (Redis, SQLite, OpenBSD, Git, etc), let alone in Zig which provides more tools to write memory safe code.

3. AI can write very good Zig already. This isn't 2024 anymore where "the LLM has seen lots of this language so will write better in this language" scenario existed. Will make you an example: I have worked in a very esoteric typescript fork called TS plus (providing among others fluent style apis for pipe-able functions) and even Opus 4.1 did well. Recently I have forked the Elm language and the LLM had no problem dealing with it, despite significant differences to the original Elm.

4. Zig's community uses Zig because it likes Zig and its tooling and doesn't like the constraints of other languages. Simple as that.