Zig – SPIR-V Backend Progress

27 points by Retro_Dev 2 days ago|5 comments

•

laszlojamf 2 days ago

I really love everything about zig except the language itself. The governance, the culture, all of it seem really cool, but reading https://ziglang.org/learn/why_zig_rust_d_cpp/ I still don't get _why_ I would use it. To an untrained eye, it seems like go, but with manual allocation. Or an imperative-only rust. Like it has some features of all the languages it competes with, but not the ones that would make me reach for them. What do people use zig for, and why zig and not one of the others?

•

Cloudef 2 days ago

Try reading zig code. For me its much more readable than the other languages, and does not suffer the fact go doesnt have language level errors. Local allocators are very useful and if you dont think so, perhaps you havent dwelved too deeply into systems programming or the language isnt targeted for you.

•

laszlojamf 2 days ago

I get the usefulness of allocators, I just don't see them as useful enough where I'd pick zig over another established systems programming language. Do you have an example?

•

chaz72 2 days ago

I think Zig would do better than Go at things like kernels, drivers, game engines, lower level sorts of things. Edited to add the obvious: SPIR-V, for instance.

Of course there’s lots of programming that can afford to pay for GC side effects, if there weren’t we wouldn’t have invented GC, but it’s a little less universal, a little less ‘system’.

For me, I came to Zig after horrible cross-platform experiences led me to try going all the way back to C and I found that I was spending way too much time learning to deal with accidental complexity instead of essential complexity. (Respect to the C masters but I failed to adapt.)

•

Gerharddc 2 days ago

Really cool to see work progressing on this! It would be awesome to one day be able to use Zig for serious shader work