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Comment by Hamcha | Hacker News Reader

I want to love this so much, kinda sad that Windows support is non-existant outside of WSL (which I try to use as a last resort option).

I love the bundling of most tasks in one app, especially in an environment where I had friends refuse to interact because of the "framework of the month" problem.

I just wish it din't rep Zig this much, I'm hyped for Zig as much as the next guy, but the website mentions is twice back to back and I really think we should stop going "it's better cause it's written in X".

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It's not enough to build something great if nobody knows about it. Marketing is just as important to the success of a project as engineering. By giving such a generous shoutout to Zig, complete with a call for donations, Jarred has effectively created a symbiotic relationship with the Zig project, a win-win situation where both projects are boosted up by each others' spotlights.

Thank you for creating Zig.

A shoutout is very appreciated and putting Zig in the title line definitely is what caught my interest (so yes Zig is being used to promote bun probably more than bun is promoting Zig at this point) but the writing specifically on the website is a bit on the nose, don't you think? "Why is Bun fast? Because of Zig"

Rust is already somewhat infamous for this ("Rewrite it in Rust" is a meme) and has caused it to develop a bit of a stigma, at least in my circles.

I'm still rooting for Zig to get its place among the big ones (and bun seems definitely a nice way to push for it) I just hope that happens without creating the annoying cult-like behaviors that plagued the crab language.

Bun relies on Zig and Zig is an unfinished product that relies on donations to survive. A shout-out to Zig is not only a nice gesture but also a smart one, since it's in Bun's best interest for Zig to survive at least until v1.

The general concern about "written in Zig" being annoying is fair. I think it's a different beast when paired with a call to donate but regardless, if RIIZ is what worries you most, then you can sleep safe because our motto is "Maintain It With Zig", a conscious rejection of "Rewrite It in *".

https://kristoff.it/blog/maintain-it-with-zig/

Thank you so much for Zig

> I really think we should stop going "it's better cause it's written in X".

I wholeheartedly disagree. I'm much more interested in this because it's written in Zig and not C or C++.

It tells me a few things about the code:

- naive-implementation performance should be pretty good

- written by someone who cares about details

- less likely to have race conditions and memory bugs

- attractive for new devs who want to work on a project in a next-generation language

At this point, the only reason to use a slow or unsafe language is that it's all the author knows.

Why Zig would make race conditions less likely?

Purely from better ergonomics[1], not a compile-time guarantee like Rust has. If your tools for concurrency are better, you're less likely to make a mistake.

1. https://kristoff.it/blog/zig-colorblind-async-await/

I totally buy your argument (and that's why the "X in rust" took place on HN) but zig is not any safer than most modern languages: https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/how-safe-is-zig/

Sometimes it is better if written in X. Tools that are themselves written in JS tend to be slow, compared to something like esbuild or swc, which, being written in compiled languages, are very fast.

No Windows support is a blocker for me.

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