What Makes the Zig Programming Language Unique?

With Zig, you can write compile time code which can be used to implement generics, compile time checks, and provide really nice error messages.

This is amazing!

https://itnext.io/what-makes-zig-unique-1b98bfb95701

Programming language experts told Andrew Kelley, the creator of the Zig programming language, that having code which could run at compile time was a really dumb idea. But he went ahead and implemented it anyway. Years later, this has proven to be one of the killer features of Zig. In the Zig world, we call it comptime, from the keyword used to mark code required to run at compile time or variables to be known at compile time.

And that is perhaps one of the things you got to constantly remind yourself while using Zig: It is just a form of C on steroids. You are not working with a high-level language. Zig doesn’t give you closures, automatic memory management, inheritance, or even interfaces. It is a bare-bones language, but comptime can often play games with your perception because it is so powerful.

zig compiler is self-hosted now !!

Some quotes

The new self-hosted compiler reduces memory usage 3x compared to the old C++ implementation, also known as the bootstrap compiler.

About package manager

The main goal of this first iteration is to enable simple usage of dependencies to start building a package ecosystem, and to make sure that we can easily package C/C++ projects, not just Zig. The Zig build system can already build C/C++ projects, so we want to make sure we can leverage 40+ years of Open Source work, and not just Zig rewrites.

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