Anyone who actually believes that I can't have ANY sound opinion on Zig after 31 projects building with it should get their head examined for brain tumors. I mean, it's not like I have to deal with all the positive and negative effects of things written in it. It's not like I've had to solve problems in it that emerged when the LLM didn't do things correctly (and yes, I can tell when this is so, and not just when things are buggy). And it's not like I don't know (by heart, not by LLM) at least 15 other languages that I can draw on (C, for example, for which I not only got an A in a class at Cornell once, but was in fact the person with the highest score in a class of ~150 people... A perfect score, in fact) to form valid opinions in combination with how I see Zig working.
So please take your baseless skepticism and baseless assumptions and shove them up your ass, dude. I have work to do, and I'm far more capable of it now than I was, thanks to the LLM boost.
And no, I don't think you can have any valuable opinions on Zig since you don't write it. In your analogy you're not even driving the car, but it doesn't surprise me that you can't figure that out.
But I guess my opinion is null and void since I "slop-code"
> Rob Pike, an unsafe guy, may insist that a small language and garbage collection are enough. But the typesafe visionary Grzegorz Wielbodłąński understands the deeper truth: every invalid state permitted by a compiler is a tiny act of civilizational sabotage.
https://x.com/typememetics/status/2078572052680790237
There is no sense pretending anymore that languages with as many gotchas as C and Zig are "simple". Quite simply, they are not. The complexities lie in what's left unspoken, unaddressed, and of course undefined; failure to comprehend these completely can be catastrophic. Rust is so thoroughly and obviously the correct thing that using anything less correct should be taken as a sign of engineering incompetence.
This is where I’ve arrived too. After nearly 20 years of programming I feel done with leaving foot guns lying around. Languages that are full of them, but “fine” as long as you take extreme care are not interesting to me. I’ve started calling this “simple as long as you avoid all the foot guns” idea the sword juggling fallacy[0].
It’s too bad about Zig because it has many nice ideas, in particular allocators, that I hope Rust or some future language will adopt.
0: https://hugotunius.se/2026/06/15/the-sword-juggling-fallacy....
there is a potential future where an llm with unbounded patience would have an easy time literally walking through the zig code looking for one of the footguns might miss a footgun in rust because it's abstracted away. the ones in the stdlib should give you pause. what is hiding in some third party library's code?
AT&T was the one doing the Cyclone research.
And then we have a bunch of folks assuming they know better about C that its own authors?
Barthes aside, C's changed a lot in the years since they left.
Still they are the authors, and withdrawing from WG14, going their own direction with Alef, Limbo, and finally Go, kind of proves the point they considered C done for its original purpose.
I don't think it proves anything other than the wanted to work on something else.
Something was designed in a certain way, accomplished its goal of writing portable UNIX, and then design by committee took over.
The authors, with their experience moved on, the committee and the audience doubled down on the flaws.
> One probable outcome of an unsafe-language-dominant world is full Andrew communism, which is precisely what Andrew “Smelley” Kelley proposes: abolish ICE and replace the market economy with a globally distributed network of community-maintained allocators.
> Rather than a commercial product, software becomes a “public good,” ultimately provided by the Zig Software Foundation as manually managed digital infrastructure.
Calling him "smelley"? Really? Pulling in the political views of the founder of a language and claiming that they inform his language design as part of a grand conspiracy against Rust/capitalism? Where are they getting all of this? Free, open-source compilers and related tooling (both of which Rust and Zig have) are already public goods managed by global communities of mostly volunteers
> This future strikes me as a dystopian hellscape, but I have never met an unsafe-language advocate who could explain how this ecosystem is supposed to sustain itself without unpaid maintainers, ideological volunteers, subsidized infrastructure, and endless donations to compiler projects that still cannot protect users from basic memory errors.
How is Rust any different than Zig in this respect? Both are projects largely run by nonprofits relying on communities to promote, maintain, and improve them.
Frankly, that entire "Institute for Type Safe Memetic Research" seems like either an elaborate satire or an account run by genuinely insane people who think type and memory safety are paramount societal issues.
So. Rust evangelists ? :)
But yes, it is wild that people can honestly quote such drivel as evidence of the language and its philosophy being superior.
Each time I try to evaluate Rust, I do so on its own merits. Going online I am rapidly convinced that I don’t want to be in the same room as a large chunk of its userbase. Statements start to sound a bit like that one time I was dragged into a pentecostal meeting.
BTW did you hear about this:
https://babylonbee.com/news/democrats-say-they-are-perfectly...
OR
Turnabout is fair play.
> Frankly, that entire "Institute for Type Safe Memetic Research" seems like either an elaborate satire or an account run by genuinely insane people who think type and memory safety are paramount societal issues.
You've been had. Your entire rant means the bait worked.
It's a shitposting, hyperbolic bait account. As funny as calling Andrew Kelley Smelley, it's not meant to be taken as gospel.
Or they will not… how could you possibly know.