I agree with the conclusion, given the current trajectory, Zig will remain to be niche forever. I know there’s (IMO unjustified) hate against LLMs but that’s just the way how (commercial) software is going to be developed from now on, no matter how we feel about it.
I’ve been waiting for a new release, for the incremental compiler to finally work on macos, for usable coroutine kqueue IO impl in std, and there’s still no light AFAIK. So many breaking changes, writer-gate, now() moved to std.Io, nuked std.posix, removed @cImport(), and I could just go on and on. It went so far that I was avoiding std for a while and I’ve just implemented everything important myself. Note that this is not hate, but I just got enough. The fatigue is real.
In the mean-time, in just 2 weeks I’ve successfully ported most of my (mostly private) projects from Zig to Rust using local LLM and it works. Sure the code is not the same quality, but it’s also not the worst and it’s definitely way above the zero effort for the prompt.
I’ve been doing Rust before and it’s not language I enjoy writing. In fact, I’ve switched to Zig because of all the problems Rust had at the time (and it still has most of them). The thing is, I will not be writing Rust by hand anymore, meta-programming is way worse but again, I will not be writing that glue myself anymore. From my initial experiments, it seems that subset of Rust might be something I can live with (in this new age).
I am slowly conserving my OSS projects and I will be maintaining them for a while but that will also likely end one day. It’s bitter, and I am sorry.
Of course, I’ve learned a lot and I think I am better programmer thanks to Zig, and I’d like to thank everybody for that. I hope nobody’s mad at me.