For a completely different take on Zig compared to the last post, here’s Dimitri Sabadie:
Today, I want to provide a more matured opinion of Zig. I need to make the obvious disclaimer that because I mainly work in Rust — both spare-time and work — I have a bias here (and I have a long past of Haskell projects too). Also, take notice that Zig is still in its pre-1.0 era (but heck, people still mention that Bun, Tigerbeetle, Ghostty are all written in Zig, even though it hasn’t reached 1.0).
I think my adventure with Zig stops here. I have had too frustration regarding correctness and reliability concerns. Where people see simplicity as a building block for a more approachable and safe-enough language, I see simplicity as an excuse not to tackle hard and damaging problems and causing unacceptable tradeoffs. I’m also fed up of the skill issue culture. If Zig requires programmers to be flawless, well, I’m probably not a good fit for the role.
There’s no one true correct choice when it comes to programming languages. Each one has pros and cons. What prospective users value in a language also varies based on personal preferences and values. I’m aligned with Dimitri here. I value correctness, reliability, and performance over surface level simplicity. If you’re into Zig though, that’s cool—the less software written in C the better.