Consider using Zig for future projects that call for high performance with limited dependencies.
On the drive home from the Atmosphere Conference, I listened to a few hours of talks and podcasts about Zig and decided to spend at least a few days learning more. In the next few days, I built a simple Protobuf library from scratch and, while I appreciated the speed and ease of development in Zig, decided to put this on hold but to consider Zig an open area of interest.
Pros#
- Zig is extremely compatible with C and C++.
- Zig builds are fast.
- Zig prioritizes memory management in ways that suggest that Zig systems could operate at very high performance.
- Ghostty is built in Zig and is one of several early success stories.
Cons#
- You have to own everything except (hopefully) the compiler. The Zig ecosystem is very immature.
- Zig itself is new and would likely be seriously questioned for any enterprise use.