I think Andrew is a big part of it, and the people he surrounded himself with are the other part.
What kind of pre-1.0 language hosts conventions? Crazy that they manage to do that.
Andrew's vision has always been clear and inspiring to me. I think this got Zig its initial following, and they have capitalized extremely well on it to grow as a community.
replyAndrew doesn't strike me as someone who does any marketing at all. He just wants to make the language he wants to use, and does it well.
replySometimes its just right time, right place. But also, Zig has received attention via projects like Ghostty, TigerBeetle, and Bun (prior to rewrite of course)
They have definitely done a lot of marketing through social media and forums like HN. There have been large numbers of posts here by Zig's developers for years, and a few releases of LLVM even mentioned Zig prominently in their release notes.
replyWith Zig, I can just import SDL.h and use it without writing a binding.
replyCan I do that in C3 or Odin?
And then you can get AI do a nicer port of SDL.zig and you get way better decls.
replyProper enums, proper tagged unions, and often reading the docs can allow the AI to distinguish T * to one of
1. [*]T
2. [:0]T
3. ?T
4. *T
And these are just the most common ones. If you know it’s a read only pointer/array then you can add the const modifier
Odin has SDL built into the language (shipped as a vendored library).
replyThat's not what I mean...
replyThere is a mountain of code written in C that you can simply include in Zig without a wrapper dependency and without having to create the wrapper yourself.
Yes, Andrew did a lot of internet cult marketing over the years, and then you have exponential free cult marketing.
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