Andrew Kelley has spent a decade building Zig. The language he created in 2016 still sits at version 0.16. No 1.0 release looms on any firm calendar. And that delay comes by design. Kelley spoke at length in a recent interview. He wants the language that ships under the 1.0 banner to stand as an uncompromising labor of love. The Register captured his stance clearly. “When we tag 1.0 it will be a true, uncompromising labor of love,” he said. The promise of backward compatibility that follows such a tag carries weight. Kelley intends the language to serve for the next 50 years. His perfectionism traces back to a personal project. Kelley set out to write a digital audio workstation. He tried JavaScript, Go, C++ and Rust. Each brought frustrations. Go’s garbage collector introduced unpredictable pauses. C++ memory bugs consumed weeks of debugging. Rust’s borrow checker rules slowed him for a full month on something as basic as font rendering. Zig grew from those specific pains.…