I maybe overstating it, but another contributing factor to its growing popularity may be the documentation. It is really nice and well presented. Reminds me of how the rust book also welcomed you to explore the language.
Zig has good docs now? Nice.
Last I looked Zig had some of the worst docs I'd seen to the point where I just looked at the std sources and eventually just gave up
Maybe language docs vs stdlib docs. Language docs are good for most topics, stdlib docs are much worse than stdlib sources.
That's exactly right. When I tried it, the Language Reference was great, and the stdlib documentation was a UX-challenged semi-broken webapp.
For what it's worth, work on it as resumed now that the self-hosted compiler is mature enough. Still very far from being complete, so we don't link it yet on the front-page, but it's being actively improved.