It's more of an in-between C and Rust than Go as it is a systems language with no built-in garbage collector for memory management. It has a lot of memory safety features, but it's not as memory safe as Rust. However, it avoids a lot of the complexity of Rust like implicit macro expansion, managing lifetimes, generics and complex trait system, etc. It also compiles much more compactly than Rust, in my experience.
In my mind, it's an accessible systems language. Very readable. Minimal footprint.
If you are not using a GC language, you WILL be managing lifetimes. Rust just makes it explicit, when the compiler can’t prove it’s safe, which Zig, C don't really care.
A better way of saying it is that Rust makes lifetimes implicit (by default), but in some cases it is necessary to manually manage lifetimes in Rust, when there's ambiguity the compiler can't resolve on its own.
In Zig and C, it's always expected that you will explicitly manage your lifetimes. Zig uses the allocator interface to explicitly allocate new buffer or heap values and its keyword 'defer' to clean up allocated variables after the scope exits so that allocations and frees generally live next to each other.
C on the other hand, is relatively unopinionated about how lifetimes are managed. The defer keyword honestly takes most of the pain of managing lifetimes away.
TigerBeetle has a clear purpose and needed those brilliant optimizations. Do you think Zig is suitable as, say, a Go replacement for prod network services and such?
Aside from the fact that Zig is still a bit immature in its std library and ecosystem, I mean. Is it a suitable systems language going forward?
Zig is actually perfect for production network services (that’s all TB is essentially, or how I see it, and what I was looking for in Zig—how to create something with explicit limits that can handle overload—it’s hard to build anything production-grade if it’s not doing NASA’s Power of Ten and getting allocation right—GC is not a good idea for a network service).
I wouldn’t say Zig’s std lib is immature. Or if anything, it has higher quality than most std libs. For example, the unmanaged hashmap interface is :chefskiss. In comparison, many std libs are yet to get non-global allocators or static allocation or I/O right.
That's great feedback. Many of us are looking at the next 5-10 years of building network services. Go has its share of issues that simply won't go away. Rust is overly complex ("concept fatigue"). Python will remain slow. So here comes Zig with massive potential and the ecosystem and community is really engaging.
Well, it's insanely simple, insanely fast, often more performant than Rust with lower resource usage, with first class C-interop and cross-compiling out of the box. It's easily my favorite language now, with Go being a close second. Both are opinionated and have a standard formatter that makes Zig code instantly readable when you see it, similar to Go. Rust was once interesting, but it's firmly in macro hell territory now, just like Swift, with concealed execution paths aplenty and neither cross-compiling out of the box.
>often more performant than Rust with lower resource usage
[citation needed]
If we are to trust this page [0] Rust beats Zig on most benchmarks. In the Techempower benchmarks [1] Rust submissions dominate the TOP, while Zig is... quite far.
Several posts which I've seen in the past about Zig beating Rust by 3x or such all turned to be based on low quality Rust code with some performance pitfalls like measuring performance of writing into stdout (which Rust locks by default and Zig does not) or iterating over ..= ranges which are known to be problematic from the performance perspective.
I would say in most submission-based benchmarks among languages that should perform similar, this mostly reflects the size and enthusiasm of the community.
