I've been waiting eagerly for this release ever since the new Io interface was announced. Pumped to start working on some new projects with this!
Love this line from the release notes:
> Lo! Lest one learn a lone release lesson, let proclaim: "cancelation" should seriously only be spelt thusly (single "l"). Let not evil, godless liars lead afoul.
What a banger of a release. The new `Io` interface was a huge breaking change for my project, but I made the transition. Zig seems to be pulling the same trick it pulled with allocators: just make it an explicit value that you pass around. Explicit allocators felt obviously right in retrospect, and so far this feels obviously right too.
Obviously, I/O as an interface is the headliner here, but there are lots of other goodies to pay attention to, such as the "juicy main".
Small integers auto coercing into floats is a nice gift to game devs. It's nice that game dev is acknowledged as one of the niches Zig can target as I believe it could really thrive there due to how easily it can integrate with C & C++. Or, rather, more easily than the alternatives.
If they knew what all of the 0.x breaking changes were going to be ahead of time they wouldn't need to be trying out different choices to see how well they really pan out!
It's strange, because it has been over 10 years now. To get to 0.20, seems like it would be another 2 to 3 years. The weirdest thing is how Zig continuously gets a pass for being "almost there", for around 5 years now.
An argument could be made that why it's taking so long is about the language's BDFL wanting the freedom to continually make breaking changes. As it is, they got another bewildering pass for sweeping 3,000 plus issues under the rug, with the move from GitHub to Codeberg.
I honestly dont see it as an issue. At least not for now. You could have languages or software released as 1.0 at any time but they are not finished or ready for it. Arguably Crystal is a bit like that.
Or you end up like NIM which they are on 3rd or 4th version already.
And frankly speaking, a lot of people took to Wiki and said it has been 10 years, in reality Andrew only started working on it full time in 2018, and had a year off due to other personal issues, and then COVID hit. Together It is more like 6 years than 10.
Odin started in 2017, had a fraction of the contributors and is soon 1.0, so that explanation isn’t cutting it.
If you instead look at the over 500 kloc of the Zig source compared to the 70 kloc of the Odin one, it’s a bit clearer why the delay happened: the goals of Zig kept expanding.
But not only that: ”juicy main” and Io is something that could have been in Zig from the early days and yet it isn’t. In the Io case it’s Zig pivoting from ”we have colorless async!” to no async, to Io.
In other words, Andrew is still experimenting with the language (and more is to come, like ranged integers). This is not the signs of a maturing language, it a language still very much in flux, trying to find its form.
The contrast to Odin is that for the last 2-3 years it has had minimal syntax tweaks, and is essentially in release candidate mode for the language.
Even if Zig didn’t need more changes, it would still need that stabilization period.
I did a really tiny contribution about zig cc supporting -exported_symbols_list, which together with the hack of filtering out -liconv makes for a very viable linux -> macOS Rust cross-compiler. There's a few caveats but those have been manageable so far.
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 51.4 ms ] threadLove this line from the release notes:
> Lo! Lest one learn a lone release lesson, let proclaim: "cancelation" should seriously only be spelt thusly (single "l"). Let not evil, godless liars lead afoul.
Small integers auto coercing into floats is a nice gift to game devs. It's nice that game dev is acknowledged as one of the niches Zig can target as I believe it could really thrive there due to how easily it can integrate with C & C++. Or, rather, more easily than the alternatives.
Also I thought Zig doesn't have interfaces....how does the IO one work?
Are we looking at 0.20, another one and half year of baking?
An argument could be made that why it's taking so long is about the language's BDFL wanting the freedom to continually make breaking changes. As it is, they got another bewildering pass for sweeping 3,000 plus issues under the rug, with the move from GitHub to Codeberg.
Or you end up like NIM which they are on 3rd or 4th version already.
And frankly speaking, a lot of people took to Wiki and said it has been 10 years, in reality Andrew only started working on it full time in 2018, and had a year off due to other personal issues, and then COVID hit. Together It is more like 6 years than 10.
If you instead look at the over 500 kloc of the Zig source compared to the 70 kloc of the Odin one, it’s a bit clearer why the delay happened: the goals of Zig kept expanding.
But not only that: ”juicy main” and Io is something that could have been in Zig from the early days and yet it isn’t. In the Io case it’s Zig pivoting from ”we have colorless async!” to no async, to Io.
In other words, Andrew is still experimenting with the language (and more is to come, like ranged integers). This is not the signs of a maturing language, it a language still very much in flux, trying to find its form.
The contrast to Odin is that for the last 2-3 years it has had minimal syntax tweaks, and is essentially in release candidate mode for the language.
Even if Zig didn’t need more changes, it would still need that stabilization period.
This tells us Zig is still rather far from 1.0.
I wonder what Andrew is thinking about all this.
Seems like a big one! I wonder how it will impact real code performance
I did a really tiny contribution about zig cc supporting -exported_symbols_list, which together with the hack of filtering out -liconv makes for a very viable linux -> macOS Rust cross-compiler. There's a few caveats but those have been manageable so far.
Absolutely in awe of Zig as a project.