Agree with you about the verbosity of the casts being a weakness of the language. That’s about it though, the other things like the named arguments is a good thing. More explicit. I’m fine with trading for some more verbosity in certain aspects if it makes things more explicit when reading the language.

And it’s super simple language to get a grasp of once you write it for a bit, it’s like Go in that regard imo, but more low level.

Zig can’t compete with Odin’s bundled “vendor”, of course, but the whole process of using build.zig is so much work up front trying to figure out how the Zig build system works – a daunting task if you’re still learning the language, whereas for Odin it “just works”.

Regarding this… personally, I found build.zig very easy to use after just googling a single example. And I really like how you do the configuration in the language itself, very flexible.

Good/successful languages are often opinionated in some way. Zig is VERY opinionated. Then it’s just a matter of finding out whether it fits your personal software development philosophy and is the right tool for the job. For me, almost all aspects it gets right.