Andrew Kelley quit his job in 2018 to build a programming language. Eight years later, Zig powers Ghostty, TigerBeetle and Uber’s cross-compilation. It’s top 5 most admired on Stack Overflow. There’s just one thing missing: 1.0. Andrew Kelley explains why.
Vitaly talked to Andrew about:
- Why Zig has no 1.0 after a decade, and why that’s deliberate
- Why Zig left GitHub
- Why Zig banned AI from Zig
- What makes Zig better than C (and why every other C replacement failed)
- Andrew’s take on Open Source
It’s a long interview, but I found it very interesting and worth it.
It’s definitely better than C but I’m still unsold on the memory unsafety. Especially after the supposed answer to Bun’s memory bugs was “just never dynamically allocate”.
comptimeis definitely neat and there are some other nice features but tbh it seems like the only true advantage it has over Rust is compile time, and only for incremental compilation. Is that enough? I would say probably not.The answer to Bun’s memory bugs was to follow a style guide. Not allocating dynamically stems from the style guide used by a mission-critical financial transactions database. Bun didn’t have to use that style guide, and honestly it would have been overkill. They could have easily adopted a different one, modified one to suit their needs, or made their own.
In general, I agree that Rust does a far better job at preventing these kinds of bugs than a style guide does, but Bun didn’t even try one and decided instead to ask Claude to rewrite it in Rust.