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by lerno·1y ago·view on hn ↗

I think the Zig community should worry more about when Jai is released. Esp given that Zig isn’t anywhere near 1.0 yet, and feature wise it’s a rather sparse language that has first mover advantage over alternatives, but as a language it actually doesn’t bring many new tools AND is bad with IDEs.

Jai similarly is hard for IDEs, but has much more depth and power.

While Zig has momentum, it will need to solidify it to become mainstream, or Jai has a good chance of disrupting Zig’s popularity. Basically Zig is Jai but minus A LOT of features, while being more verbose and annoyingly strict about things.

Odin on the other hand has no compile time and in general has different solutions compared to Zig & Jai with its rich set of builtin types and IDE friendliness.

And finally C3 which is for people who want the familiarity of C with improvement but still IDE friendliness with limited metaprogramming. This language is also less of an overlap with Jai than Zig is.

Amazingly, in agreement with most of this. The sooner that Jai is released, the more likely it will be a Zig popularity disruptor. And Zig is definitely vulnerable. It has a large amount of issues, is dealing with trying to maintain being a limited/simple language, and still far from 1.0.

Regardless of comptime, Odin and C3's public accessibility, and being close enough to Jai for folks to contemplate switching over, will eat at its public mind share. In both cases (be it Zig or Odin/C3), the longer that Jai keeps making the mistake of avoiding a full public release, the more it appears to be hurting itself. In fact, many would argue, that a bit of Jai's "shine" has already worn off. There are now many alternative languages out here, that have already been heavily influenced by it.