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Interview with Zig language creator Andrew Kelley [video]

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Re: Interview with Zig language creator Andrew Kelley [video]

#61

Post by pron »

littlestymaar wrote: post #56
pron wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On the other hand, Zig makes a deliberate decision not to bother itself with memory safety too much This is not true. Zig places a strong emphasis on memory safety, it just does so in a way that's very different from either Java's or Rust's. I wrote more about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24293329

> It does so with runtime checks that are turned on in development and testing and turned off -- either globally or per code unit -- in production. This isn't “memory safety”, with this reasoning you could say “C is memory safe if you use ASAN during debug”: it is exactly equivalent except Zig checks are less powerful than the full suite of existing sanitizers for C, but it's enabled by default in debug mode, which i…

No, this is full memory safety enforced through runtime checks. ASAN does not give you that. Zig has only arrays and slices with known sizes and no pointer arithmetic (unless you explicitly appeal to unsafe operations).

Re: Interview with Zig language creator Andrew Kelley [video]

#62

Post by gameswithgo »

HourglassFR wrote: post #59

I've stumbled upon the Zig language a while back and have been checking in regularly to follow its progress. Recently I took the time to write a very small program to get a feeling for it. My thoughts : - It's a very low level language. Having written mostly Python for the past few years, it is quite the contrast. I had to force myself to think in C to get the train going - Getting my head around the error handling t…

Regarding strings, nobody doubts that having good string support built into a high level language is a good idea, but with a low level language that has a lot of problems. Especially a language whose design principle is to avoid surprising allocations. So that is necessarily going to make things like concatenating strings more complex, and so on.

Re: Interview with Zig language creator Andrew Kelley [video]

#63

Post by [deleted] »

littlestymaar wrote: post #52
logicchains wrote: post #10

I work in HFT, and one of the key concerns when writing low-latency code is "is this code allocating memory, and if so, how can I stop it?" Zig is the perfect language for this use case as none of the standard library implicitly allocates, rather for anything that allocates, the caller must pass in an allocator. The stdlib also provides a handy arena allocator, which is often the best choice. This is a huge advantage…

[deleted]

[deleted]

Re: Interview with Zig language creator Andrew Kelley [video]

#64

Post by dnautics »

littlestymaar wrote: post #57
pron wrote: post #2

I think that Zig's simplicity hides how revolutionary it is, both in design and in potential. It reminded me of my impression of Scheme when I first learned it over twenty years ago. You can learn the language in a day, but it takes a while to realize how exceptionally powerful it is. But it's not just its radical design that's interesting from an academic perspective; I also think that its practical goals align with…

> What a truly inspiring language It's indeed an inspiring language, and rust is taking inspiration from it already: https://github.com/jswrenn/project-safe-transmute/blob/rfc/r... > lack of generics I can't wait before Zig2 comes and eventually adds generics…

Zig already has generics, gp was imprecise. They are not a part of the language, but an emergent feature that is simple enough to implement using comptime.

Edit: clearly gp was not mistaken, just imprecise.

Re: Interview with Zig language creator Andrew Kelley [video]

#65

Post by dnautics »

bigbizisverywyz wrote: post #58
pron wrote: post #2

I think that Zig's simplicity hides how revolutionary it is, both in design and in potential. It reminded me of my impression of Scheme when I first learned it over twenty years ago. You can learn the language in a day, but it takes a while to realize how exceptionally powerful it is. But it's not just its radical design that's interesting from an academic perspective; I also think that its practical goals align with…

> ...lack of macros and lack of generics ... To be fair, you can do absolutely everything you want to do in C++ without using either of these features at all, it just takes a bit of discipline. And if you see the flack that go gets for not including generics then I'm not so sure that that is a great way to get people to adopt your language.

Zig has generics, they are just not part of the language (very easy to implement using what zig gives you).

Re: Interview with Zig language creator Andrew Kelley [video]

#66

Post by logicchains »

littlestymaar wrote: post #52
logicchains wrote: post #10

I work in HFT, and one of the key concerns when writing low-latency code is "is this code allocating memory, and if so, how can I stop it?" Zig is the perfect language for this use case as none of the standard library implicitly allocates, rather for anything that allocates, the caller must pass in an allocator. The stdlib also provides a handy arena allocator, which is often the best choice. This is a huge advantage…

[deleted]

I didn't say I actually use it, I said it's the perfect language for that use case. In practice there are many other factors that determine whether a language is adopted, e.g. library availability, compiler maturity, and the fact that it's not simple to integrate a new language into an existing codebase of very many lines of C++.

Re: Interview with Zig language creator Andrew Kelley [video]

#67

Post by littlestymaar »

pron wrote: post #61
littlestymaar wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It does so with runtime checks that are turned on in development and testing and turned off -- either globally or per code unit -- in production. This isn't “memory safety”, with this reasoning you could say “C is memory safe if you use ASAN during debug”: it is exactly equivalent except Zig checks are less powerful than the full suite of existing sanitizers for C, but it's enabled by default in debug mode, which i…

No, this is full memory safety enforced through runtime checks. ASAN does not give you that. Zig has only arrays and slices with known sizes and no pointer arithmetic (unless you explicitly appeal to unsafe operations).

> full memory safety enforced through runtime checks [disabled in production]

Which means you cannot guaranty your program doesn't exhibit memory unsafely unless you stumble upon it during testing. Yes there are fewer footguns in Zig[1] than in C (which is the opposite of C++), but dangling pointer dereferences, double free and race conditions will still be lurking in any reasonably-sized codebase. Calling it “memory-safe”, is dishonest. And I actually don't think it serves Zig. It's a clever language with tons of good ideas, no need to oversell it with misleading claims about memory safety.

[1]: but still plenty of them https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/#Undefined-Behavior

Re: Interview with Zig language creator Andrew Kelley [video]

#68

Post by dnautics »

tobz1000 wrote: post #17

Some of Zig's ideas fascinate me, both the great low-level concepts (e.g. arbitrary-sized ints), but much more than that, the high level concepts. Particularly great is Zig's handling of both macros and generic types, the answer to both of which seems to be: just evaluate them at compile-time with regular functions, no special DSL or extra syntax. Andrew mentions in the video a big drawback of this system - implicati…

It's pretty easy to use Zig as the low level for languages which can take a C FFI. Self-promotion: I wrote zigler which integrates zig as inline code in elixir.

Re: Interview with Zig language creator Andrew Kelley [video]

#69

Post by voldacar »

cycloptic wrote: post #39
voldacar wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah when I heard about this I instantly thought of game engines, but it makes total sense for HFT too. "Modern C++", with all its constant little mallocs and frees is so awful for anything that requires ultra low latency

Can you explain how this is a problem in modern C++? I was under the impression that all the STL containers (string, vector, list, map, etc.) worked the same and have an allocator parameter. Are there other areas where these are missing? Or is the issue that STL implementations almost always default to an allocator that uses malloc? I'm not trying to dog on Zig here (it's a nice little language) but this just doesn't…

It isn't really a matter of can do/cannot do. It's more about the default patterns promoted by the idiomatic way of writing code. Yeah you could write C++ code that constantly passes around allocators while also using STL heavily, but it will be verbose, unnatural, and ugly.

As well as having nicer syntax in general and real metaprogramming instead of the brain damage that is templates, zig promotes this kind of allocator-aware programming style in a way that's clean and idiomatic

Re: Interview with Zig language creator Andrew Kelley [video]

#70

Post by dnautics »

andi999 wrote: post #14

What is the best way to start with zig, if you know C by heart? I had a look a while ago, but I feel I miss out how the concepts are to be used in practice.

I was very rusty with c and found learning zig to be a breeze. If you know c by heart you'll do great!
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