Just being ambitious isn’t necessarily good. Look at Perl6.

If you instead look at the over 500 kloc of the Zig source compared to the 70 kloc of the Odin one, it’s a bit clearer why the delay happened: the goals of Zig kept expanding.

But not only that: ”juicy main” and Io is something that could have been in Zig from the early days and yet it isn’t. In the Io case it’s Zig pivoting from ”we have colorless async!” to no async, to Io.

In other words, Andrew is still experimenting with the language (and more is to come, like ranged integers). This is not the signs of a maturing language, it a language still very much in flux, trying to find its form.

The contrast to Odin is that for the last 2-3 years it has had minimal syntax tweaks, and is essentially in release candidate mode for the language.

Even if Zig didn’t need more changes, it would still need that stabilization period.

This tells us Zig is still rather far from 1.0.

I wonder what Andrew is thinking about all this.

The "module" system is another hack.

The idea is to offer some kind of CLI parsing in the std. It says minimal, but the discussion also veers into some more advanced options.

The discussion resulted in two PRs (that I know of):

- Type-driven: https://codeberg.org/ziglang/zig/issues/30677

@dotcarmen extracted it into a package (https://codeberg.org/dotcarmen/clip) so people could more easily try it out.

- Composition-based: https://codeberg.org/ziglang/zig/pulls/31620

If you're familiar with Rust's clap, it's a bit like derive vs builder API.

You can also see how each approach would look in practice if you inspect the diff for the "tools" directory on the PRs.