Who's right though? The article seems to go directly against what parent said above?
> In Java, there’s a similarly looking thread interruption mechanism. Critically, it doesn’t support interrupting syscalls: IOException and InterruptedException are both checked and unrelated, meaning that IOing functions are not interruptible
One says IOing functions are not interruptible, other says "You can interrupt a blocking IO operation" :)
All my days of low level stuff were in the windows world where async/cancel was supported since nt kernel days at least. Wrapping this coherently at some level of abstraction was always worth doing, although threads are just one way. Overlapped I/O let you do it all on one thread. Linux looks harder.
Great that Zig is supporting this more “first class”; not strictly required, but looks useful.
I know syntax does not REALLY matter, but Zig is just kind of subpar syntax wise. Its really verbose and picked weirdly from what already exists. Zig code is usually hard to read because it really noicy, and has weird things not existing in other languages without merit.
I don't think that it's really subpar. It's just unusual compared to others. In and of itself it's very consistent. For instance there's `|capture|` for capturing all sort of things(errors, optionals, ...) in nearly all control flow constructs. `blk:` for naming blocks, `if`s, `switch`, and so on.
Have a look at this blog post:
https://matklad.github.io/2025/08/09/zigs-lovely-syntax.html
|capture| hides an inconsistency that bugs me – everywhere else, assignment to a variable flows leftwards. |capture| is an unnatural rightwards assignment.
in general, I like zig syntax, but i find that it had very little regard to how the eye moves on the page. it’s jarring at times.
Although assignments as expressions in C are convenient, I don't think they make a ton of sense and find Zig's capture easier to read (easier to immediately see what's being evaluated)
I saw that article previously. Nearly all of the syntax seem to be in-house with little benefit. All the examples could just use some modern c-like thing.
Zig has benefits, like comptime, no hidden control flow, memory mngmt, cross compilation etc. But its syntax is just a mouthfull of wats, whys and wtfs.
I can forsee a compile to Zig languge popping up sometime soon.
I'm shipping in Rust but any reason to do so in Zig ? What does it offer over Rust ? Something tangible benefit to end user or developer using ai assisted development ?
The borrow checker will catch all kinds of bugs that AI-generated code will happily compile in Zig but will blow up as UB at runtime.
Zig's value prop is different and closer to a modern C: it fits in your head and maps fairly closely to assembly. There is no hidden control flow or hidden allocations, so you can tweak performance at a very low level. You're the pilot, not the compiler.
Rust trades the low-level clarity for compiler-enforced safety. If you're not a code artisan or don't care about being one, then please use Rust.
> The borrow checker will catch all kinds of bugs that AI-generated code will happily compile in Zig but will blow up as UB at runtime.
This has not been my experience; Claude does a great job of writing unit tests for the Zig code, and combined with Zig's fuzzing features and a Python-based integration testing suite, I have avoided hitting runtime UB so far. In exchange, I get much faster compile times, which are important for the agentic development loop.
So far claude has been fine to generated zig code. Dont have lots of issues. Tijy local models have more problems with zig, need additional instructions.
In general, what helps is to instruct ai to use test coverage to ensure the cover all edge cases with tests.
it's also my opinion. Which makes me wonder : isn't there an opportunity to create a variant of rust that would make absolutely zero compromise on UB and safety at the detriment of user experience ( which we don't care about now, with AI generating the code) ?
Like programming in a kind of super strict IL. Or the opposite : super poweful, super abstract language, yet extremely strict.
Can LLMs not write Zig code ? I'm not really understanding your explanation for why we can write other languages with LLM but not Zig here.
> Rust trades the low-level clarity for compiler-enforced safety. If you're not a code artisan or don't care about being one, then please use Rust.
Not really seeing the connection here. What do you mean by code artisan? Are you trying to gatekeep Zig because you think Zig is too difficult for LLMs?
You asked if there was "tangible benefit to end user or developer using ai assisted development". My answer is no, it can be done but has no benefits for this use case. Use Rust here, because its compiler acts as an AI safety net.
Being a code artisan is not gatekeeping. It means if you're used to being close to the metal and sometimes know better than the compiler, Zig is for you. If you're not, use Rust.
With all due respect, that tickles my spidey senses. People claiming to know better than a compiler about low-level details of their code are most often either engaging in premature hyper-optimisation, or suffer a specific kind of greybeard hubris IMHO
The idea that humans can't solve a specific problem more efficiently than a generalised algorithm that has to work for all code ever written in the language is a lie that JS script kiddies tell themselves to justify remaining ignorant without feeling bad about it.
Oh, humans can definitely do that, in some capacity, if they're attentive, slept enough, aren't hungry, or in emotional distress, for a limited amount of time.
A generalised algorithm can do this consistently, billions of times, which happens to be the amount of problems involved in building an application.
> Being a code artisan is not gatekeeping. It means if you're used to being close to the metal and often know better than the compiler, Zig is for you. If you're not, use Rust.
You are saying that if you are not a code artisan (who by definition can't use LLM) likeyou then they should not use Zig. Honestly, I don't care. I'm not a code artisan, if Zig can help me ship faster and better with LLMs, my job is done and that's what I get paid for.
> Codex CLI taking over 15 minutes to recompile on my fairly high-end machine. Zig's incremental compilation optimizations are amazing, giving near-instant recompiles measured in ms instead of minutes.
So there is a benefit here mentioned by the non-arisans which is what I wanted to know but you wouldn't know if you don't use ai assisted delivery.
Zig lets you be very explicit about what you want. Zig's hello world takes 3 or 4 lines where other languages take 1. That is how much other languages make decisions for you. Some people care to make those decisions themselves.
This is the weirdest basis for comparing a language I've ever seen. Zig is one line as well, `std.debug.print("Hello, world!\n", .{});`, unless you're counting defining main and its brackets as 4 lines, in which case... Rust has that too, Java is 7 lines and C# is 8 lines to import System library and define the Program class as well if you're not using top-level statements / implicit usings.
---
Edit for replies complaining I used debug.print:
Okay, `try std.io.getStdOut().writer().print("Hello, world!\n", .{});`. Still one line, more explicit with chained methods, but that still just goes to show you how arbitrary this metric is -- Zig's standard library makes you be more explicit with one function, but it doesn't make you be as explicit with another one that works essentially the same way but writes to a different stream, ergo this has nothing to do with the language's inherent explicitness but rather comparing the implementation of a single random function.
std.debug.print is, as its name suggests, for debug output, not for program output.
In Zig, you create a buffered writer for the stdout file handle, write hello world to the buffer, and then flush it. It exposes what's actually happening underneath.
I often use LLMs to build and modify open-source tools for personal use and Rust's compile times are disgusting, eg. Codex CLI taking over 15 minutes to recompile on my fairly high-end machine. Zig's incremental compilation optimizations are amazing, giving near-instant recompiles measured in ms instead of minutes. I would certainly classify four orders of magnitude faster compilation as a tangible benefit even if you're not writing the code by hand.
Rust is quite slow but that is an interesting benefit but still not sure what the trade offs are, Rust has a huge mature ecosystem and there are lot of jobs for it.
Are you able to ship faster with Zig vs Rust? How did you arrive at the 4x figure?
I'm really puzzled why people are so angry over using ai assistance with Zig. LLMs are always going to be able to write better code faster and better than anyone who calls themselves code artisans in this day and age.
I think this comment posted a while back someone who worked on Zig is pretty telling:
> The key problem with Zig nowadays is how much of its community and adoption is driven by anti-Rust sentiment. As a result, while Rust puts beginner onboarding and documentation at the center of its culture, as opposed to the “C neckbeard”'s culture, Zig is going the other way around.
And ultimately this didn't stop people from using AI generating Zig code as much of the users in the thread are already using it to ship quality faster.
Happy to use the work the community outputs and culture is largely irrelevant when prompting LLMs outputs code that doesn't really require any intimate knowledge with the syntaxes
You can interrupt a blocking IO operation with either interrupt() or close().
https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/25/docs/api/java.base...
> In Java, there’s a similarly looking thread interruption mechanism. Critically, it doesn’t support interrupting syscalls: IOException and InterruptedException are both checked and unrelated, meaning that IOing functions are not interruptible
One says IOing functions are not interruptible, other says "You can interrupt a blocking IO operation" :)
Great that Zig is supporting this more “first class”; not strictly required, but looks useful.
in general, I like zig syntax, but i find that it had very little regard to how the eye moves on the page. it’s jarring at times.
if (evaluation) result = evaluation
if (evaluation) |result|
Although assignments as expressions in C are convenient, I don't think they make a ton of sense and find Zig's capture easier to read (easier to immediately see what's being evaluated)
Zig has benefits, like comptime, no hidden control flow, memory mngmt, cross compilation etc. But its syntax is just a mouthfull of wats, whys and wtfs.
I can forsee a compile to Zig languge popping up sometime soon.
The borrow checker will catch all kinds of bugs that AI-generated code will happily compile in Zig but will blow up as UB at runtime.
Zig's value prop is different and closer to a modern C: it fits in your head and maps fairly closely to assembly. There is no hidden control flow or hidden allocations, so you can tweak performance at a very low level. You're the pilot, not the compiler.
Rust trades the low-level clarity for compiler-enforced safety. If you're not a code artisan or don't care about being one, then please use Rust.
This has not been my experience; Claude does a great job of writing unit tests for the Zig code, and combined with Zig's fuzzing features and a Python-based integration testing suite, I have avoided hitting runtime UB so far. In exchange, I get much faster compile times, which are important for the agentic development loop.
In general, what helps is to instruct ai to use test coverage to ensure the cover all edge cases with tests.
Like programming in a kind of super strict IL. Or the opposite : super poweful, super abstract language, yet extremely strict.
> Zig's value prop is different and closer to a modern C: it fits in your head and it maps fairly closely to assembly.
This can't be correct for the simple reason that it has both a modern optimizing compiler (LLVM) and UB.
A modern compiler will try to autovectorize your code, so you don't really know what the assembly will be.
UB gives compiler license to rewrite your code however it sees fit.
> Rust trades the low-level clarity for compiler-enforced safety. If you're not a code artisan or don't care about being one, then please use Rust.
Not really seeing the connection here. What do you mean by code artisan? Are you trying to gatekeep Zig because you think Zig is too difficult for LLMs?
Being a code artisan is not gatekeeping. It means if you're used to being close to the metal and sometimes know better than the compiler, Zig is for you. If you're not, use Rust.
With all due respect, that tickles my spidey senses. People claiming to know better than a compiler about low-level details of their code are most often either engaging in premature hyper-optimisation, or suffer a specific kind of greybeard hubris IMHO
A generalised algorithm can do this consistently, billions of times, which happens to be the amount of problems involved in building an application.
You are saying that if you are not a code artisan (who by definition can't use LLM) likeyou then they should not use Zig. Honestly, I don't care. I'm not a code artisan, if Zig can help me ship faster and better with LLMs, my job is done and that's what I get paid for.
> Codex CLI taking over 15 minutes to recompile on my fairly high-end machine. Zig's incremental compilation optimizations are amazing, giving near-instant recompiles measured in ms instead of minutes.
So there is a benefit here mentioned by the non-arisans which is what I wanted to know but you wouldn't know if you don't use ai assisted delivery.
This to me reads like an LLMism.
---
Edit for replies complaining I used debug.print:
Okay, `try std.io.getStdOut().writer().print("Hello, world!\n", .{});`. Still one line, more explicit with chained methods, but that still just goes to show you how arbitrary this metric is -- Zig's standard library makes you be more explicit with one function, but it doesn't make you be as explicit with another one that works essentially the same way but writes to a different stream, ergo this has nothing to do with the language's inherent explicitness but rather comparing the implementation of a single random function.
In Zig, you create a buffered writer for the stdout file handle, write hello world to the buffer, and then flush it. It exposes what's actually happening underneath.
Are you able to ship faster with Zig vs Rust? How did you arrive at the 4x figure?
I'm really puzzled why people are so angry over using ai assistance with Zig. LLMs are always going to be able to write better code faster and better than anyone who calls themselves code artisans in this day and age.
I think this comment posted a while back someone who worked on Zig is pretty telling:
> The key problem with Zig nowadays is how much of its community and adoption is driven by anti-Rust sentiment. As a result, while Rust puts beginner onboarding and documentation at the center of its culture, as opposed to the “C neckbeard”'s culture, Zig is going the other way around.
And ultimately this didn't stop people from using AI generating Zig code as much of the users in the thread are already using it to ship quality faster.
Happy to use the work the community outputs and culture is largely irrelevant when prompting LLMs outputs code that doesn't really require any intimate knowledge with the syntaxes