After I wrote Why Zig Over Rust for Systems Programming, the obvious next question was C. The Rust question was about safety and how much ceremony I was willing to accept for it. The C question is different, because Zig and C want the same things. Both are small languages without a Garbage Collector and both stay close to what the machine does. So this post is not about leaving C for something completely different. It is about the parts of C that cost me time and how Zig deals with them. All the code was compiled on a Mac with Zig 0.17 and clang.
C is the language of UNIX. The kernels, the C libraries and most of the system libraries that every other language calls in the end are written in C and the man pages describe them with C prototypes and C examples. A C program from the 1990s still compiles today and there is a C compiler for almost every CPU that was ever made. The language is small enough that one book, The C Programming Language by Kernighan and Ritchie, covers all of it. Zig itself does not try to replace any of that. It talks to C libraries directly and it uses the C ABI when it needs to. I am not writing this post because I think C is bad; C is my favorite programming language! I am writing it because I do not want to write new code in C any more.
