Experience • Zig

Conceptually, Zig is entirely different to any other language that I have used. I don't come from a system level programming background, nor do I have much experience with manual memory management (and no, Rust does not count as manual memory management) so it feels like starting from scratch. Nevertheless, the language had caught my eye almost from the moment I properly looked at it, so I'm quite happy that it hasn't been a challenge to get started with. I'm still grasping onto the fundemental concepts of manual memory management, but Zig has helped with that journey thus far and I am proud of my progress.

That being said, Zig is still in its early days (no 1.0 release yet) and I have already been subject to a few reasonable breaking changes. This isn't really ideal when coming into the language, but I can't hold it against Zig, nor will I wait until a 1.0 release — who knows how long that will take? One of my other main concerns is with documentation which at present, is severely lacking. This is even true for Zig libraries by the community which has been the cause of long headaches and error messages too complex for me to understand. I hope that this improves over time as the language develops.

Apart from those concerns, I have high hopes for Zig and aim to make good use of it in the future while growing in the systems programming space.