Andrew Kelley quit his job in 2018 to build a programming language. Eight years later, Zig powers Ghostty, TigerBeetle and Uber’s cross-compilation. It’s top 5 most admired on Stack Overflow. There’s just one thing missing: 1.0. Andrew Kelley explains why.

Vitaly talked to Andrew about:

  • Why Zig has no 1.0 after a decade, and why that’s deliberate
  • Why Zig left GitHub
  • Why Zig banned AI from Zig
  • What makes Zig better than C (and why every other C replacement failed)
  • Andrew’s take on Open Source

It’s a long interview, but I found it very interesting and worth it.

  • It’s definitely better than C but I’m still unsold on the memory unsafety. Especially after the supposed answer to Bun’s memory bugs was “just never dynamically allocate”.

    comptime is definitely neat and there are some other nice features but tbh it seems like the only true advantage it has over Rust is compile time, and only for incremental compilation. Is that enough? I would say probably not.