PGpgruenbacher·Dec 26, 2019
Shout out to [zig](https://github.com/ziglang/zig) as a modern alternative to C.
In I love coding in Cziglang
zig
Zig2016–2026
ziglang / zig
zig
Moved to Codeberg
373Distinct people
681Mentions
3Explicit recommenders
43.3KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Moved to Codeberg
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Where it is used
What people are saying
My favorite of his https://x.com/joelreymont/status/1990981118783352952 > Claude discovered a bug in the Zig compiler and is in the process of fixing it! ...a few minutes…
rdtsc used a recommendation phrase. 3 indexed comments match. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.
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Also in these discussions
- tigerbeetle/tigerbeetle · linked in 6 of the same discussions
- llvm/llvm-project · linked in 2 of the same discussions
- oven-sh/bun · linked in 2 of the same discussions
Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 4:01:40 AM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year681 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2016-01-08 12:54:33 UTC to 2026-09-19 17:18:26 UTC.
* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 9 | 1 | 8 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 0 | 5 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 21 | 2 | 19 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 34 | 2 | 32 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 60 | 3 | 57 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 111 | 4 | 107 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 93 | 8 | 85 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 113 | 12 | 101 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 85 | 5 | 80 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 124 | 9 | 115 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 26 | 1 | 25 |
What Hacker News says
34 sourcesI am waiting for the milestone[1] for Zig to be able to bootstrap itself. Usually, this means the language is mature enough.
[1] https://github.com/ziglang/zig/projects/2
In Game Boy Advance “Hello World” Using ZigCheck out the Zig standard library and the tests for examples on doing some basic stuff with the language. Tests are generally at the end of files, you can search for "test".
0.5.0 Documentation
https://ziglang.org/documentation/0.5.0/#Introduction
root std library
https://github.com/ziglang/zig/tree/master/lib/std
examples of writing and reading to a file
https://github.com/ziglang/zig/blob/master/lib/std/event/fs....
There are also a ton of projects that the creator has done with Zig, you can check those out for more examples as well.
https://github.com/andrewrk?utf8=%E2%9C%93&tab=repositories&...
Looks like he has an advent of code repo too.
In Game Boy Advance “Hello World” Using ZigI tried to get Zig running on a Game Boy Advance a while ago, but never really got to a point I was happy with. Great to see someone else working on it!
It's cool that you got the built-in linker to work. When I tried, I got a bunch of "unsupported architecture" errors and had to use GNU ld. Have things gotten better recently or is this an ARM-vs-Thumb thing?
I was excited to be able to use packed structs to represent the different IO registers -- at last, no more OR-ing the wrong flag into the wrong register! -- but unfortunately those don't quite work right on ARMv4T yet: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/2767
In Game Boy Advance “Hello World” Using ZigThe issue to get rid of the llvm-objcopy build dependency is https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/2826. This appears to be the only thing that is currently required to be installed besides Zig itself.
In Game Boy Advance “Hello World” Using Zig> You spend a lot of time talking about code formatting. The more mature teams I’ve worked with have settled on a format and use linters to identify deviations. From my perspective, that is a non-issue.
Formatting is not a major part of the result, it is just a nice side effect; I didn't mean to give it so much attention. I will not say, however, that formatting is a non-issue. It isn't an important issue, but it is one that a disappointing number of man-hours have been spent thinking about. Just look at all the comments and controversy on this ticket about zig not supporting tabs: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/544. Consider how much time has been spent making auto-formatters, and making them preserve things like comment alignment. There are 'less mature teams'; what will you do for them?
> I can type characters much faster t
Read the rest
han I can drag a mouse, so I’m not seeing any increase in productivity.
Like I said, I don't want to rewrite everything in scratch. I have no intention for the future to be anything but keyboard-driven; an editor which is aware of tokens and syntax trees will be better able to facilitate editing, no matter what your inputs. Consider fructure[1], which is not dissimilar to what I propose. I don't think it uses the mouse at all.
1: https://github.com/disconcision/fructure
The zig wrapper is only a minimal experiment and work in progress now, also I've hit a little bug :)
https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/3211
BUT the sokol_app.h and sokol_gfx.h headers require an underlying platform 3D-API (e.g. GL, D3D11 or Metal) and window system to setup the swap chain. On a bare metal machine with only a 2D framebuffer they're not all that useful unfortunately.
In Making a RISC-V Operating System Using RustThere's a task to rename UB to illegal behavior: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/2402
As well as some followups to see if Zig can detect all of these errors:
* https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/1966
* https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/2301
In Zig 0.5.0 Release Noteshttps://ziglang.org/documentation/master/#Zen
>> Minimize energy spent on coding style.
For me this is sort of important because languages not having standard coding style end up 10000 coding styles. Rust fmt is an excellent example for avoiding that. Does anybody use Zig + fmt?
I know they have something. https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/1523
In Zig 0.5.0 Release NotesCan you though? I cant get cURL to work:
https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/988
In Zig 0.5.0 Release NotesI might be alone with this thought: Zig seemed really appealing in the beginning, but now I dislike it more and more with each release. It does not seem to keep the simplicity of C at all, it has lots of peculiarities, and it is becoming more and more bloated. I would consider it a C++ replacement at this point, not a C replacement due to its increasing complexity. One of Zig's philosophy was simplicity[1], but I do not think it applies now.
[1] https://github.com/ziglang/zig/wiki/Why-Zig-When-There-is-Al...
In Zig 0.5.0 Release NotesLooks like its still lacking in network support:
https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/2007
I wonder though, does it already have socket support? that could be a stopgap for me. Edit, looks like it doesnt have sockets either:
https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/1271
Edit 2, looks like it does:
https://github.com/ziglang/zig/blob/5026db1d/lib/std/net.zig...
https://github.com/ziglang/zig/blob/5026db1d/lib/std/os.zig#...
In Zig 0.5.0 Release NotesAs an aside, Zig[0] recently merged a change to try and tackle the use case of [a]sync-agnostic functions: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/1778. The "What Color is Your Function" blog post appears to have been one of the inspirations behind the change. Some of Andy's (the language creator) recent videos go over it in detail: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUICU6mgcyGy61pojwuWyHA
[0]: https://ziglang.org
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