Functional Programmers need to take a look at Zig
The author, a functional programmer with extensive Haskell experience, evaluates programming languages based on expressiveness, type-system programmability, and predictability, and finds Zig's comptime feature compelling for reducing abstraction noise and enabling low-level control. They critique garbage-collected functional languages for creating performance bottlenecks and disconnecting developers from system-level realities, suggesting Zig offers a more sustainable systems programming model. While valuing the abstraction power of monads, the author argues for imperative, memory-conscious languages that allow deeper optimization and alignment between programmer intent and machine behavior.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Functional Programmers need to take a look at Zig. I’ve been tinkering around with Zig to explore what’s possible with comptime. Whenever I evaluate a new language I use three axes: How well can I express my ideas in this language. Or in other words, how easy is it for me to express the domain of the program. This is a test on how much noise is applied to the ideas I want to express in the program. Noise is anything that must be written for the program to function that is not relevant to the domain. For example, the canonical example of noise is the need to do manual memory management. We must allocate memory for the program to run, but this is orthogonal to the program’s domain; its an implementation detail.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Pure-systems.