A Web Framework for Zig

Posted4 months agoActive4 months ago

nivethan

159 points

23 comments

jetzig.devTechstory

supportivepositive

Debate

30/100

Zig Programming LanguageWeb FrameworksRestful Apis

Key topics

Zig Programming Language

Web Frameworks

Restful Apis

The HN community discusses Jetzig, a new web framework for the Zig programming language, with some users praising its design decisions and others raising concerns about its RESTful API implementation and performance.

Snapshot generated from the HN discussion

Discussion Activity

Moderate engagement

First comment

Peak period

12-15h

Avg / period

2.3

Comment distribution23 data points

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Based on 23 loaded comments

Key moments

01Story posted
Sep 11, 2025 at 1:42 PM EDT
4 months ago
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02First comment
Sep 11, 2025 at 5:41 PM EDT
4h after posting
Step 02
03Peak activity
6 comments in 12-15h
Hottest window of the conversation
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04Latest activity
Sep 13, 2025 at 1:53 PM EDT
4 months ago
Step 04

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Discussion (23 comments)

Showing 23 comments

lgrebe

4 months ago

3 replies

Jetzig reads funny in german something like "now-ish"

Jetzt = now [1]

German adjective suffix: -ig [2] The German suffix -ig attaches to nouns, verbs and even adverbs. Given this flexibility, it ranks among the most common adjective endings in German. You can use -ig words to express that something is a certain way or happens a certain way. traurig: sad, sadly wässrig: watery knackig: crunchy, crispy abhängig: dependent, addicted geizig: stingy

[1] https://de.pons.com/übersetzung-2/deutsch-englisch/jetzt [2] https://www.lingoda.com/blog/en/german-adjective-suffixes/

Onavo

4 months ago

1 reply

It's a perfectly fine name. There's a billion dollar web framework company named Zeit which famously built https://now.sh

moritzruth

4 months ago

2 replies

They rebranded to Vercel, most likely because Zeit turned out to not be a perfectly fine name.

justin66

4 months ago

I'd propose Zig have a specific version for Germany and call it Z-Germans.

juliangmp

4 months ago

Do you mean because of the newspaper called _Die Zeit_?

unwind

4 months ago

The "-ig" suffix corresponds roughly to English's "-ish", I would say. As a native speaker of neither German nor English, though.

rendx

4 months ago

It doesn't merely sound like it, it is a German word, translating to current/present.

https://www.dwds.de/wb/jetzig

https://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/jetzig

https://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/jetzig

endigma

4 months ago

4 replies

This site makes a big point of using the term "RESTful" repeatedly, but it seems to be JSON-based by default?

I don't know why modern web frameworks insist on continuing to misuse or misapply the term despite a fairly large amount of messaging recently about how exactly this term is misapplied, and the resurgence of frameworks and tools that do correctly apply it, e.g. HTMX, Datastar, Alpine AJAX.

Otherwise, this looks cool. I'd encourage you to un-roll-your-own docs and use something like Starlight or Docusaurus so you can have usable search and versioned docs.

_heimdall

4 months ago

1 reply

That's a fight we lost two decades ago now unfortunately. Nearly any modern-ish API is a JSON-based RPC. There's nothing wrong with that, JSON RPC is a plenty fine solution for many common use cases, it just isn't REST.

moritzruth

4 months ago

Note that there is also a standard for JSON-based RPC systems, called JSON-RPC [0]. Not every JSON-based self-titled "RESTful" API uses JSON-RPC.

[0]: https://www.jsonrpc.org/

elcritch

4 months ago

1 reply

Being RESTful and the data encoding used are largely orthogonal aspects of an API.

Wikipedia RESTful article says:

> The formal REST constraints are as follows:[10]

> Client/Server – Clients are separated from servers by a well-defined interface

> Stateless – A specific client does not consume server storage when the client is "at rest"

> Cache – Responses indicate their own cacheability

> Uniform interface

> Layered system – A client cannot ordinarily tell whether it is connected directly to the end server, or to an intermediary along the way

dustbunny

4 months ago

1 reply

The key line is actually this:

>An application that adheres to the REST architectural constraints may be informally described as RESTful, although this term is more commonly associated with the design of HTTP-based APIs and what are widely considered best practices regarding the "verbs" (HTTP methods) a resource responds to, while having little to do with REST as originally formulated—and is often even at odds with the concept.

elcritch

4 months ago

Taking that to mean you disagree. However using HTTP verbs has nothing to do with using JSON or not. Notice it says "HTTP" not "HTML" APIs.

dustbunny

4 months ago

Ha I came here to complain about the same thing.

Kinda makes me disappointed in the authors especially when they link to the REST wikipedia page as if they know what it means.

jadbox

4 months ago

What do you think of HTMX vs Datastar for a new production app? Any key reasons to use one over the other?

winrid

4 months ago

1 reply

I don't know zig - is this query type safe in that if I change a member name in the struct it'll fail to compile? https://github.com/jetzig-framework/jetquery

usually I do this with codegen, pretty cool if zig's type system is this powerful

Also holy crap: for (cat.homes

This is like django!

messe

4 months ago

Yes, all reflection in Zig is static reflection, so that should generate a compile error (although how obvious it will be is a different question).

timeon

4 months ago

Sad to see that cookie banner. One would not expect opensource project to be associated with spyware.

heldrida

4 months ago

Here's a video introduction to Jetzig by one of the contributors:

Screencast #1 - Introduction https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qeaO_MwfUII

lukaslalinsky

4 months ago

As much as I like Zig, I can't imagine working on something as string/list-heavy as web without a garbage collector. Not to mention having a web server without coroutines. Web services these days are just glue code between various pieces of infrastructure, you are constantly waiting on something, it just doesn't make sense to run these in full blown threads.

BozeWolf

4 months ago

Nice, looks like a decent framework. I used to do a lot of python for backend web apps, but recently jumped on the hypetrain and used go for developing a web app (devops) tool. Single binary, easy deployment etc etc.

From that experience, I think this competes with go based web apps mostly. And if so, it makes a good chance at becomming succesful. Zig seams to have a better type system. Additionally the quality of documentation for this project is pretty good. That is something the go ecosystem seems to be lacking in general. The rest of the go perks are there as well. Single binary etc.

Now the ecosystem needs to catch up. Nice!

sroerick

4 months ago

I really like Jetzig. It just seems to make every framework decision that I think feels right. Major props to the team

hajimuz

4 months ago

it’s using http.zig, so only http1.1?

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ID: 45214159Type: storyLast synced: 11/20/2025, 6:51:52 PM

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