It’s hard to do something that is truly novel these days. Though I’d argue that Zigs upcoming approach to Async IO is indeed novel on its own. I haven’t seen anything like it in an imperative language.

What’s important is the integration of various ideas, and the nuances of their implementation. Walter Bright brings up D comptime in every Zig post. I’ve used D. Yet I find Zigs comptime to be more useful and innovative in its implementation details. It’s conceptually simpler yet - to me - better.

You mention Ada. I’ve only dabbled with it, so correct me if I’m wrong, but it doesn’t have anything as powerful as Zigs comptime? I think people get excited about not just the ideas themselves, but the combination and integration of the ideas.

In the end I think it’s also subjective. A lot of people like the syntax and combination of features that Zig provides. I can’t point to one singular thing that makes me excited about Zig

Scala did async io in a very similar way over a decade ago except it was far more ergonomic, in my opinion, because the IO object was implicit. I am not convinced by either scala or zig that it is the best approach.

As someone who still thinks one should write C (so as a completely uncool person), what I like about Zig is that it is no-nonsense language that just makes everything work as it is supposed to be without unnecessary complications, D is similar, except that it fell into the trap of adding to many features.

So, no, I do not really see anything fundamentally new either. But to me this is the appealing part. Syntax is ok (at least compared to Rust or C++).

Having said this, I am still skeptical about comptime for various reasons.

We've recently adopted Zig at a few systems at our company but I think maybe "cool" or "new" is the wrong metric?

I view Zig as a better C, though that might be subjective.

It gets hyped by a few SV influencers.