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Comment by RussianCow | Hacker News Reader

Realistically, you probably shouldn't. Zig seems to be positioning itself as a systems-level language—more of an alternative to C/C++/Rust than to Python/Go. If you're building low-level, high-performance software, it might be interesting to you; otherwise, I don't see a practical benefit.

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> Python/Go

I wouldn't put those two languages in the same class. Go has about the performance of Java/C# with about the memory usage of C++. It's much closer in performance and resource efficiency to those languages than it is from a scripting language like Python.

They both emphasize productivity over other factors like performance and correctness, so I think they're very much in the same boat in terms of use cases.

Go was created for correctness. It is strongly, statically typed, it won't compile if there are unused imports or variables, and it won't compile either if you don't free up resources after usage. C/C++ don't do that and have UBs.

Go is in the same ballpark than C#: a modernized C with GC, good productivity although not as good as a scripting language, and good performance although not as good as ANSI C. They're popular because they stand in that sweet spot.

Python is easier than Go or C# to pick up, but it's also 20x slower than C rather than 2-3x.

Correctness may have been a goal of the Go language authors but they don't seem to have achieved it.

I could find countless other comments about this on HN, but here's the top hit in a quick search. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26632821

Thanks, this is the take I was looking for. It would be great if Unreal Engine could be ported to Zig and then I would be happy to get into it again.

I think that a Zig API for Unreal is very likely to appear at some point.

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