Every day in the month of June, 2026 I'm going to spend at least one hour learning Zig.
Why?
Zig is the only programming language that I've used that has taken a strong position on keeping AI out of the language. I don't want any of the work I choose to do to be infected by AI at any level. I thought this would require using a language of my own creation, but it looks like the Zig team feels the same way I do, so going forward all of my programs are going to be written in Zig until something changes and that includes porting the programs I've already written that I use every day to Zig.
In order to do this, I need to get good with the Zig language, and the only way I know how to do that is to use it.
A couple years ago I played with Zig, and while there were some features that I thought were really cool (like built-in SIMD support), it wasn't enough for me to really get into it when I could do most of what it did in languages I was already proficient with. But things are different in 2026, and Zig has grown as well, and I think it's time for a change.
So for the month of June I'm going to invest at least an hour a day and hopefully by the end of the month I'll be proficient enough to do some real work.
I probably won't write about this every day (I just don't think I'll have the time), but I plan to post updates as I make make meaningful progress and share any ideas or experiments that go beyond the exiting documentation and published writing on the subject. I'll be porting code from Python, Golang, Node.js and maybe others, so there should be a little something for everybody.
Jason J. Gullickson, 2026