> As far as I know, no one is using it in production after 7 years of development.
- Uber uses Zig to produce hermetic builds of their backends and was able to move their C/C++ codebases to arm64 thanks to Zig's C/C++ cross-compilation support.
- Bun is written in Zig and its sudden success was big enough to cause Deno to have an identity crisis.
- TigerBeetle is written in Zig and it's probably the most promising upcoming database company out there.
- There are a few more notable examples, but I haven't been given permission to talk about them publicly yet.
> Honest question: why do we all keep talking about Zig?
> Are the people behind it just really good at marketing?
The project is simply inherently interesting. For one reason or another, nobody figured out a proper build & cross-compilation experience for C/C++ before Zig did it, just like nobody has figured out a good package manager yet for C/C++ and we're about to do it.
When Apple Silicon came out Zig was the first compiler able to cross-compile for it (way before LLVM btw) thanks to our custom linker, and thanks to it and the fact that we're working on our own custom backends, we're also going to achieve incremental compilation with in-place binary patching, ultimately reducing linking time to basically zero for incremental rebuilds.
Zig is also the only language that has async/await but that doesn't have an ugly & wasteful split between blocking and evented versions of the same networking library.
I'm stopping here with technical arguments, but there would be more to talk about.
Lastly and most importantly, the project has an interesting approach to finances and governance: we've had a non-profit foundation for longer than Rust and we have made a point to never, ever, let big tech companies influence the governance of Zig.
The Zig Software Foundation pays its developers (instead of hiring copywriters & marketing people) and 90+% of what we make through donations or support contracts goes to developers. The rest is infrastructure and administrative costs (eg CI, accountant).
I'm the guy who's most in charge of marketing and I'm currently working on the automated documentation system because Zig pretty much markets itself.
Was apple silicon the thing that brought "caring about cross compilation" back from the dead in general? small-scale embedded use never really went away, but it was always a distinct niche...
Do you know of any in depth reviews of Zig’s async implementation? It would be great to see a walk through of the choices and decisions made along the road to the final version.
Apple shipped a compiler with the M1 Mac, yes, but if you wanted to compile for Apple Silicon from say a Linux x86_64 machine, there was no toolchain that was able to do it other than Zig.
Yeah idk. I don’t want to be snarky but “we had a cross compiler for ARM with a few tweaks” that had already had hardware shipping for half a decade doesn’t sound all that impressive.
- Uber uses Zig to produce hermetic builds of their backends and was able to move their C/C++ codebases to arm64 thanks to Zig's C/C++ cross-compilation support.
https://www.uber.com/en-US/blog/bootstrapping-ubers-infrastr...
- Bun is written in Zig and its sudden success was big enough to cause Deno to have an identity crisis.
- TigerBeetle is written in Zig and it's probably the most promising upcoming database company out there.
- There are a few more notable examples, but I haven't been given permission to talk about them publicly yet.
> Honest question: why do we all keep talking about Zig? > Are the people behind it just really good at marketing?
The project is simply inherently interesting. For one reason or another, nobody figured out a proper build & cross-compilation experience for C/C++ before Zig did it, just like nobody has figured out a good package manager yet for C/C++ and we're about to do it.
When Apple Silicon came out Zig was the first compiler able to cross-compile for it (way before LLVM btw) thanks to our custom linker, and thanks to it and the fact that we're working on our own custom backends, we're also going to achieve incremental compilation with in-place binary patching, ultimately reducing linking time to basically zero for incremental rebuilds.
Zig is also the only language that has async/await but that doesn't have an ugly & wasteful split between blocking and evented versions of the same networking library.
I'm stopping here with technical arguments, but there would be more to talk about.
Lastly and most importantly, the project has an interesting approach to finances and governance: we've had a non-profit foundation for longer than Rust and we have made a point to never, ever, let big tech companies influence the governance of Zig.
The Zig Software Foundation pays its developers (instead of hiring copywriters & marketing people) and 90+% of what we make through donations or support contracts goes to developers. The rest is infrastructure and administrative costs (eg CI, accountant).
I'm the guy who's most in charge of marketing and I'm currently working on the automated documentation system because Zig pretty much markets itself.