I'm currently at a crossroads: C++ or Zig. One is very popular with a large comm...

uecker · 2025-07-26T10:50:44 1753527044

Why not C?

Its only real issue is that people will constantly tell you how bad it is and how their language of choice is so much better. But if you look at how things work out in practice, you can usually do things very nicely in C.

mananaysiempre · 2025-07-26T14:42:49 1753540969

My choice in this situation is indeed C, but every once in a while I hit a problem that makes me yearn for better metaprogramming.

Perfect hashing that you’d ideally use two different approaches for depending on whether the platform has a cheap popcount (hi AArch32), but to avoid complicating the build you give up and emulate popcount instead. Hundreds of thousands of lines of asynchronous I/O code written in a manual continuation-passing style, with random, occasionally problematic blocking synchronization sprinkled all over because the programmer simply could not be bothered anymore to untangle this nested loop, and with a dynamic allocation for each async frame because that’s the path of least resistance. The intense awkwardness of the state-machine / regular-expression code generators, well-developed as they are. Hoping the compiler will merge the `int` and `long` code paths when their machine representations are identical, but not seeing it happen because functions must have unique addresses. Resorting to .init_array—and slowing down startup—because the linker is too rigid to compute this one known-constant value. And yes, polymorphic datastructures.

I don’t really see anybody do noticeably better than C; I think only Zig and Odin (perhaps also Hare and Virgil?) are even competing in the same category. But I can’t help feeling that things could be much better. Then I look at the graveyard of attempted extensions both special-purpose (CPC[1]) and general (Xoc[2]) and despair.

[1] https://github.com/kerneis/cpc

[2] https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/archive/xoc/

uecker · 2025-07-26T16:41:03 1753548063

It would be interesting to understand better where language feature are actually needed or helpful, and where the code should be organized differently. I also observe that often cure if worse than the disease.

Many example I see where people argue for metaprogramming features are not all convincing to me. For example, there was recently a discussion about Zig comp-time. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44208060 This is the Zig example: https://godbolt.org/z/1dacacfzc Here is the C code: https://godbolt.org/z/Wxo4vaohb

Or there was a recent example where someone wanted to give an example for C++ coroutines and showed pre-order tree traversal (which I can't find at the moment), but the C code using vec(node) IMHO was better: https://godbolt.org/z/sjbT453dM compared to the C++ coroutine version: https://godbolt.org/z/fnGzszf3j (from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43831628 here). Edited to add source.