InfoWorld reports:
Zig, a general purpose programming language that interacts with C/C++ programs and promises to be a modern alternative to C, has made an appearance in the Tiobe index of programming language popularity. Zig entered the top 50 in the April edition of the Tiobe Programming Community Index, ranking 46th, albeit with a rating of just 0.19%. By contrast, the Google-promoted Carbon language, positioned as an experimental successor to C++, ranked just 168th.

Tiobe CEO Paul Jansen argues that high-performance languages “are booming due to the vast amounts of data that needs to be processed nowadays. As a result, C and C++ are doing well in the top 10 and Rust seems to be a keeper in the top 20.”

Zig has all the nice features of C and C++ (such as explicit memory management enhanced with option types) and has abandoned the not-so-nice features (such as the dreadful preprocessing). Entering the top 50 is no guarantee to become a success, but it is at least a first noteworthy step. Good luck Zig!
Tiobe bases its monthly ranking of programming language popularity on search engine results for courses, third party vendors, and engineers. Here’s what they’s calculated for the most popular programming languages in April of 2023:

PythonCJavaC++C#Visual BasicJavaScriptSQLPHPGo

April’s top 10 was nearly identical to the rankings a year ago, but assembly language fell from 2022’s #8 position to #12 in 2023. SQL and PHP rose one rank (into 2023’s #8 and #9 positions) — and as in March, the rankings now shows Go as the 10th most popular programming language.

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