I’m trying over the top to make the people believe zig is cool and sweet.
See, for ex. An improvisation on the 'Symbol Ranking' theme
(it’s about data compression, but it’s my personal stuff, nothing more)
Are there any people around that could boost the development of Zig?
Some time ago I noticed Zig was in the TOP50 at tiobe,
but now it’s only “mentioned”. What was happened?.. I’m upset 
I think you shouldn’t be upset and not have to worry too much about this, because on my side, I’ve been seeing Zig popping up all over the place, without even looking hard to find it. For example, given the recent turmoil in the Rust community (first trademarks, then RustConf) , it seems in every thread I look that discusses these incidents, Zig is always mentioned as an alternative language for exploration. Then you have The Primeagen on Youtube / Twitch who has a pretty big following, exploring Zig on live streams and giving it a serious try. I just saw an interview with Chris Lattner (of LLVM, clang, Swift, and now Mojo fame) where he mentions Zig as the inspiration for Mojo’s comptime metaprogramming model. So at least from my perspective I’m sensing lots of disturbance in the Force caused by Zig!
I hope it doesn’t become a popularity contest. My interest in Zig started from the article about CGo, and I didn’t fully appreciate it immediately until trying to build more projects in pure Golang and discovering that despite the Rob Pike guidance that everyone write new code in Go, there was lots of bindings to existing C which meant CGo was actually effort that was hidden from me. I think that’s what is new and interesting about Zig. From the start, it is accepting C as a fact of life. I mean I began to notice how much new code is written in C when I started trying to get into the Ras Pi and Arduino (C++). So being good/better at C is very compelling by itself. I think delivering it to so many platforms is already a huge undertaking. For example, I learning Zig by trying to build for the wasm32-wasi target which is dominated by Rust. Then those projects use a tool to generate C files which is supposed to prove how WebAssembly can be written in any language. Except the reality is Rust, and C bindings if you are honest. C is the gateway to all the other languages. They are making new C code all the time now, and they don’t even do it manually. So there’s just more C, not slowing down. This is why Zig is very helpful almost the new weapon we have against the tide of C…
oh I started rambling and forgot that I wanted to mention Bun.sh. I think it has a lot of folks watching because it can compete against Node and Deno. So there’s cool projects built with Zig.
A big push is certainly the new survey from Stack Overflow and the result of Top paying technologies.
The best way to promote Zig is to not directly promote Zig. Instead, make great software that users love, and it promotes itself.
How does this list even work?
Are there any people around that could boost the development of Zig?
I’m curious exactly what you want to be “boosted” here… Earlier releases of Zig? More software in the ecosystem? More popularity?
I’m a fan of slow and steady, and focusing on building a foundation before building the house.
Really interesting topic. I’ve studied libraries and legacy code for a while now and a major topic that doesn’t get addressed much is the question of pacing and the rate of adoption.
My professional background is primarily focused around C/C++ (especially understanding and updating legacy systems). C++ in particular has a whole host of features (ala std::bind) that seemed like someone took a best guess at the time and tried to come up with a solution. Ultimately, I don’t think you can fix language problems with library solutions… but I digress. They tried anyway and now you have to teach everyone that “If you want to bind, don’t use bind.”
This year, C++ will be ~43 years old - if we’re lucky, Zig too will be 43 years old someday. In my personal (and biased) opinion, I think the best thing that Zig can do is avoid the baggage created by issues like std::bind or introducing awkward features that we have to forget about every 6 years. If that can be avoided, you’ll get a more solid ecosystem that will follow.
It’s also good to remember that languages like Python (which was invented around 1991) took years to begin gaining traction (and that was even before it found a home in data science). We have a long way to go - keep it simple and write good software like this post said:
The best way to promote Zig is to not directly promote Zig. Instead, make great software that users love, and it promotes itself.