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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]

#91

Post by _urga »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #90
_urga wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first rule of C is that no one masters C, but you could try anyway and still have time to master Zig in a matter of weeks, which is a rounding error. Given that both offer a C compatible ABI, what would serve your projects better?

I can't help but feel like in our industry C is successful (vs its 80s competition of Pascal/Modula-2, or Ada etc.) partially because of some of the same reasons that Git is successful now. Yes, it is powerful and flexible; but also in some ways unnecessarily arcane and 'dangerous' and _this gives the user a feeling of cleverness_ that is seductive to software engineers. Put another way: Most of us enjoy the mental s…

"Put another way: Most of us enjoy the mental stimulation of programming, and we enjoy the mental challenges (in general). C makes us feel clever. Witness the "obfuscated C programming contest" etc."

Yep, only C makes me feel stupid (but I enjoy that experience too!).

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

#92

Post by dnautics »

_urga wrote: post #88
lokl wrote: post #25

Zig is appealing to me, but I wonder whether time spent mastering Zig would be better spent mastering C.

The first rule of C is that no one masters C, but you could try anyway and still have time to master Zig in a matter of weeks, which is a rounding error. Given that both offer a C compatible ABI, what would serve your projects better?

If one does both, almost certainly learning zig will make for a better C programmer, as zig often forces you into patterns that would be best practices for a C programmer.

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

#93

Post by cmrdporcupine »

_urga wrote: post #91
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't help but feel like in our industry C is successful (vs its 80s competition of Pascal/Modula-2, or Ada etc.) partially because of some of the same reasons that Git is successful now. Yes, it is powerful and flexible; but also in some ways unnecessarily arcane and 'dangerous' and _this gives the user a feeling of cleverness_ that is seductive to software engineers. Put another way: Most of us enjoy the mental s…

"Put another way: Most of us enjoy the mental stimulation of programming, and we enjoy the mental challenges (in general). C makes us feel clever. Witness the "obfuscated C programming contest" etc." Yep, only C makes me feel stupid (but I enjoy that experience too!).

Oh don't get me wrong, I'm a philosophy major drop-out, not a CS student. :-) I have never gotten off on clever-C, and it makes me feel stupid, which yeah, isn't awful either (humbling).

Luckily my day-job has nothing to do with mental gymnastics even though I'm a software engineer at Google and work in plenty of low-level stuff. Most sensible software development bears little resemblance to the stuff on whiteboards in coding interviews etc.

After 20 years of this I know the right thing is to reach for a library, and if that doesn't exist, then reach for Knuth or some other reference rather than try to write it myself from scratch.

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

#94

Post by dnautics »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #83
flohofwoe wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well yes, but in the end all languages have this sort of fractal nature. But there is diminishing value in how deep you want to go into the rabbit hole. Of course there's always more to learn, but with C you're fairly quickly leaving the language and move into the layers of compiler- and hardware-trivia (good to know nonetheless, but often not really relevant for being productive in C) where in other higher-level lan…

C exposes a lot of things, and also hides a lot of things about the underlying system that can get confusing. What's an "int"? Or a "long" You need to know for your platform what the bit width is on your platform, because it's not explicit in the name, and the language is willing to do a bunch of implicit stuff behind the scenes with only a warning or two. Should you really be using 'char'? Is yours a legit use of it…

If what you're talking about (obfuscated int) is due to c being a victim of its own success, hardware manufacturers implementing C's that elided the meanings of these types to match their own architecture, against the long term best interests of C, to "make porting code easier" in the short term?

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

#95

Post by mratsim »

pron wrote: post #36
dom96 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Other languages -- like Nim, D, C++ and Rust also have a feature similar to Zig's comptime or are gradually getting there -- but what Zig noticed was that this simple feature makes several other complex and/or potentially harmful features redundant. I'm curious where this impression of Zig comes from, as this is precisely what Nim has set out to do: a small core extensible via metaprogramming. Are there features th…

> Are there features that Nim implements which go against this premise? if so, what are they? :) Nim has generics (plus concepts), templates, and macros. Zig has just comptime, through which it achieves all those goals (minus some macro capabilities that it deems harmful anyway) with just one, very simple, cohesive construct. You could argue on whether you like this or not, but you can't argue that Zig's approach isn…

> Zig has just comptime, through which it achieves all those goals (minus some macro capabilities that it deems harmful anyway) with just one, very simple, cohesive construct. You could argue on whether you like this or not, but you can't argue that Zig's approach isn't fundamentally more minimal. Zig is a language you can reasonably fully learn in one day; I don't think you could say the same about Nim.

"some macros" are downplaying Nim macros, it's like saying Lisp has some AST rewrite capabilities.

Nim macros goals are two-folds:

1. adding functionality to the language without baking it in the compiler. A prime example is ``async``, ``async`` including a nice async/await syntax can be completely implemented as a library without reserving keywords to do things like `pub async fn`.

2. Automating away boilerplate.

From what I understood, Zig comptime is only about making compile-time function evaluation first-class.

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

#96

Post by petr_tik »

fanf2 wrote: post #49
cycloptic wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nit pick: On modern systems malloc isn't a syscall, it's implemented in userspace. (Sorry, I couldn't help it) That's not to say you're safe to call other syscalls, many of them either require memory allocations in-kernel (see ENOMEM) or can block indefinitely.

Never mind modern systems, malloc() was never a syscall :-) One of the great things about K&R is that it shows you how to implement parts of the C library, including a simple malloc(), demonstrating that the library does not need to be magical.

Thanks you and your parent for pointing this out! I should be more precise, sbrk is the underlying system call that might be invoked inside malloc

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

#97

Post by petr_tik »

dcolkitt wrote: post #53
petr_tik wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how often does it happen that your interns work on the hot path of your trading systems, which is where I assume you care the most about avoid syscalls like malloc?

To be honest, I'd be a lot more worried about physics PhDs then I would interns. I've seen plenty of 20 year-old engineering students write solid low-latency code. I can't say the same thing about string theorists. It'd be pretty unusual for junior or non-technical people to write code in "core" components of the system. Things like datafeed parsers, order handlers, inventory management, safety checks, networking lib…

> But even with all these layers in place, you still need an actual strategy to run at the end of the day. Everything in the quoter can be optimized to hell, but if the strategy module is spinning for 1000+ microseconds because it's running some bloated ML model, then none of that really matters.

From what I have heard, Optiver have a performance lab, which replicate real conditions with an exchange replayer and they can measure wire-to-wire latency for every release.

Hiring people for their maths chops as quants, you probably don't expect them to know about HW-level optimisations at the beginning of their finance careers, which, I guess, is the reason for such a performance lab. Build tools that help people bring their best skills to the table and catch regressions.

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

#98

Post by pron »

littlestymaar wrote: post #87
pron wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and rust is taking inspiration from it already But C++/Rust can never have Zig's primary feature -- simplicity. Zig's power is not that it has comptime, but that it has little else . > I can't wait before Zig2 comes and eventually adds generics… No need. Zig gives you the same capabilities as generics do, only through a separate feature that other languages also have in addition to generics. In other words, it has…

> But C++/Rust can never have Zig's primary feature -- simplicity Sounds like a Go pitch, except Zig ain't Go. And while comptime is a cool feature, it's also a really complex one! > In other words, it has generics, but without having generics as a special construct. Zig recognises that once you have that other feature (compile-time introspection) you don't need generics as a separate construct, but they can be just…

> it's also a really complex one!

No, it's a very simple one, so much so that it's erasable: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24293611 And still it is probably the most complex aspect of Zig.

> Zig is cool, but I hoped the “generics are too complex of a feature” meme would die now that Go is getting generics, and I'd be really sad to see come back…

You've misunderstood me. Generics are a good thing -- if that's all you have. But if you have generics and procedural macros, it turns out that you can do the work of both with a feature that's simpler than either. The capability generics add is a very important one, but given that low-level languages need another one as well, it turns out that generics can be subsumed into that one without being a separate and additional construct. Zig has generic types and concepts/typeclasses; these just aren't atomic language constructs.

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

#99

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

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…

Standard library documentation is indeed clunky as it is auto-generated for the most part. This is something the community has been working on improving but it isn't a priority at this stage in part because the standard library undergoes breaking changes pretty frequently right now.

Optional and ErrorUnion are a tiny bit redundant in that one could represent the Optional as another value in an ErrorUnion, and that might even happen as an optimization step in the case of ?!/!? types at some point in the future, but they have very different handling in the language as they are used for very different things.

I personally like that Zig doesn't bother with "strings" at a language level at all and just considers everything as arrays of bytes. String handling is a complexity nightmare and I feel that Zig wisely chooses to be simple instead.

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

#100

Post by pron »

mratsim wrote: post #95
pron wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are there features that Nim implements which go against this premise? if so, what are they? :) Nim has generics (plus concepts), templates, and macros. Zig has just comptime, through which it achieves all those goals (minus some macro capabilities that it deems harmful anyway) with just one, very simple, cohesive construct. You could argue on whether you like this or not, but you can't argue that Zig's approach isn…

> Zig has just comptime, through which it achieves all those goals (minus some macro capabilities that it deems harmful anyway) with just one, very simple, cohesive construct. You could argue on whether you like this or not, but you can't argue that Zig's approach isn't fundamentally more minimal. Zig is a language you can reasonably fully learn in one day; I don't think you could say the same about Nim. "some macros…

Yes, plus introspection. Zig tries very, very hard to avoid macros, so macros are an anti-feature from Zig's perspective. That you could do what Zig finds important for its domain, like conditional compilation, writing a typesafe println, generic types, and generating pretty-printing routines all in simple Zig without macros is a cool discovery. I don't know if it's true, but I think the desire to avoid macros at all cost was a bigger motivation for Zig's design than, say, generic types.

In other words, there is a capability here that Nim really, really wants, and that Zig really, really doesn't want, so on that front they are not competing in their designs.

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