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Comment by eatonphil | Hacker News Reader

Of all the reasons I might imagine someone feeling like C is easier to pick up than Zig, "hardware-software knowledge to know how to architect low level code in general" does not make a ton of sense to me. In what way do you feel this was easier in C?

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I think their point is that you need to learn that stuff and with C you can learn it "accidentally" through C learning materials. Zig doesn't have yet enough learning materials to "accidentally" teach you systems programming.

The solution would be to have learning materials that teach you systems programming in a way that is not tied to a specific language, but I don't know of any example of that, and I guess the same applies to all the people that I had this discussion with in the past.

when i have an idea for a program i want to build, i struggle to express it in terms of structs, pointers, and C/zig’s language features. but with C, i can often find similar programs and find good examples of how to do what i want.

for example right now i’m working on an SDL/opengl app with an immediate mode gui, and there’s enough code in the wild for me to pour over to understand how and why they structure their programs

but when i started with zig i would often get stuck, unable to really understand the c code i was interfacing with and struggling with the language basics a bit

On knowing how to structure low level code, I highly recommend reading Casey Muratori's blog post on Semantic Compression: https://caseymuratori.com/blog_0015

And, more generally, watching some of his (free) handmade hero video series: https://handmadehero.org/

Wow, that was incredibly helpful. I could read writeups of straightforward code all day. I also love how his ethos extends to the design of the website as well. Thanks so much for sharing.

Yeah, that makes sense. We'll try to improve the situation, we just need to get a bit further ahead with the language first.

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