I can say the same (although my career spans only 30 years), or, more accurately, that it's one of …

This is the real answer (amongst other goodness) - this one is well executed and differentiated Every language at scale needs a preprocessor (look at the “use server” and “use gpu” silliness happening in TS) - why is it not the the same as the language you use?

I agree. I look forward to a future high-level language that uses something like comptime for metaprogramming/interfaces/etc, is strongly typed, but lets you write scripts as easily as python or javascript.

Great comment! I agree about comptime, as a Rust programmer I consider it one of the areas where Zig is clearly better than Rust with its two macro systems and the declarative generics language. It's probably the biggest "killer feature" of the language.

Well put. The majority of language development for the last 20 years has proceeded by adding more features into languages, as they all borrow keywords and execution semantics from each other. It's like a neighborhood version of corporate bureaucracies, where each looks across the street, and decides "they've got a department we don't have, we better add one of those". I like languages that dare to try to do more with less. Zig's comptime, especially the way it supplants generics, is pretty darn awesome. I was having a similar feeling with Elixir the other day, when I realized that I could built every single standard IPC mechanism that you might find in something like python.threading (Queue, Mutex, RecursionLock, Condition, Barrier, etc) with the Erlang/Beam/Process mailbox.

> hence its "zero-cost abstractions", made to give the illusion of a high-level language without its actual high-level abstraction What does this mean? For example (you can pick another example if you want), how is C++'s std::vector less abstract than Java's ArrayList?

> Developers writing low-level code lose the explicitness they need for review, while those writing high-level programs don't actually gain the level of abstraction required for a smooth program evolution that they need. I've described this in the past as languages being "too general purpose" or too "multi-paradigm". Languages like Scala that try to be Haskell and Java in one. > I have no idea or prediction on whether Zig will become popular I think LLMs may be able to assist to move large C codebases to Zig in the next decade. Once zigc compiles C-Linux, bit-by-bit can be (LLM-assistedly) ported to Zig. This it not soon, but I think will be it's killer feature. I don't mind if Linux becomes Rust+Zig codebase in, say, 10y from now. :)