Is it? I'm with you on gobsmackingly ancient, but it's "doesn't support long options" which I haven't bumped into. I do replace some coreutils, but not all of them.

What's a good example of such a utility?

Ok, sure, we can reason about anything. We could reason about machine code, if we had the time and inclination.

I barely participate in Hacker News anymore because it seems to have collectively lost the ability to extract meaning from words, unless an exhausting and totally excessive amount of attention is put into satisfying a misplaced sense of precision. There's no intellectual charity left and it sucks.

The central claim is that Zig's use of comptime is similar enough to templates to conflate them. That's simply incorrect. There's no value in trying to extract information from something which makes such a basic mistake as that, it doesn't contribute to a discussion, it distracts that discussion down a blind alley.

This blog post is disqualified from any serious discussion, because it doesn't know the distinction between templates, which Zig's comptime constructs are not, and partial evaluation with reified types, which Zig's comptime constructs are.

It's not possible to make a positive contribution after a mistake that basic.

Here's an example of someone getting the design space correct, and therefore contributing to the discussion in a positive way. He doesn't end up liking Zig, for reasons I disagree with, but he does completely evade being not-even-wrong, which is table stakes.

https://hirrolot.github.io/posts/why-static-languages-suffer...