So did Rust pre-1.0

Stability guarantees are a pain in the neck. You can't just break other people's code willy nilly.

> This makes zig unique. It's fun to use and it stays fresh.

You mean like how Rust tried green threads pre-1.0? Rust gave up this one up because it made runtime too unwieldy for embedded devices.

Zig is years away to become industry relevant, if at all, of course they can experiment all they like.

Many other languages do try things out, they just do it in a separate official channel from the stable release or unofficial extensions. Depending on how many users the language has, that may still be more implementation experience than Zig making all devs try it.

I suspect the actual difference is the final decision making process rather than the trial process. In C++, language extensions are tried out first (implementation experience is a requirement for standard acceptance) but committee debates drag on for years. Whereas Python also requires trial periods outside the stable language but decisions are made much more quickly (even now that there's a steering rather than single BDFL).

Good

> Worst case you can always rollback changes.

No, you cannot. People will leave in masses. In perl they announced experiments with a mandatory use experimental :feature. You couldnt publish modules with those, or else you are at risk.

This made perl exciting and fresh. Python on the other hand constantly broke API's, and had to invent package version locks and "safe" venv's. Which became unsafe of course.

Languages and stdlib are not playgrounds. We see what came out of it with C and C++ with horrible mistakes getting standardized.

jai - thekla’s new game, announced but not yet released —- order of the sinking star[2]

[1]: https://jangafx.com/software/embergen

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_the_Sinking_Star

And most importantly, Zig is aiming at being a C++ replacement with the simplicity of C, it is not trying to replace C.

Your comment about gamedev focus makes no sense as that it the most hardcore segment of all the programming there is. So if a language is good for gamedev, it's good for everything else - with high performance.

I'm still in the GC camp with Go and don't see myself leaving any time soon but Zig is just rust-fugly and takes for ever to complete(it started 10 years ago, mind you). Odin is essentially complete, just lacks official spec. I like it but can' bring myself to use it as it lacks methods and I won' be going back to writing a procedural code like its 2002.

I'm curious to see Jai being released, despite having no use case for it. My initial post is merely about purposefulness, or the lack of, for named programming languages as nowadays John's name will carry more weight than Zig could ever have. so without Zig being 1.0 after a decade, and having no competitive advantage over Jai, it has no chance to survive after Jai is released. As I said, Odin will likely will as it is quite simpler, more niche language. Zig just goes directly against Jai and it will lose.