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Zig's New Relationship with LLVM

kristoff.it

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Re: Zig's New Relationship with LLVM

#31

Post by oshea64bit »

higerordermap wrote: post #3

I always like innovations in programming tooling. To me zig sounds like a system language written by system programmers, while rust is more influenced from FP and webdev communities, which is reflected in both tooling and language. To people asking why zig when there's rust, both are nice in different ways.

Maybe this is an ignorant question, but how exactly is Rust influenced by web dev? I don't see how the aspects that make Rust popular (ownership, lifetimes, strong type system etc.) contribute much to web dev in particular. Languages used for the web like JS, Python, Ruby seem popular precisely because they abstract lower-level details.

Re: Zig's New Relationship with LLVM

#32

Post by gravitas »

I see zig users commenting here -- the "getting started" guide at https://ziglearn.org/ immediately fails with the installable zig binary from Arch (0.6.0) due to https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/5683

I'd never heard of zig until now, but as a community having top level "how to get started" website using features only available from the Master branch of github is... not a good way to get people into your language. It'd be nice if your getting started guide only used features from the tagged latest version at least... (I get that it's moving fast, but geez this is a Hello, World sample that fails)

Re: Zig's New Relationship with LLVM

#33

Post by aidenn0 »

higerordermap wrote: post #3

I always like innovations in programming tooling. To me zig sounds like a system language written by system programmers, while rust is more influenced from FP and webdev communities, which is reflected in both tooling and language. To people asking why zig when there's rust, both are nice in different ways.

That's interesting because the people I've seen that are part of the zig foundation all have some sort of web-adjacent background; I know Andrew has mentioned working at OKCupid, and the author of this post worked at Redis.

To some degree, this is probably just because that's where the money is (A quick look at Andrew's blog shows lots of non-web stuff for personal projects prior to Zig), but the gravity of a day-job is fairly strong.

I'm a systems programmer by day, but my github profile indicates mostly web and common-lisp related things; I definitely look at my tools through that lens. The fact that I can get assembly-level profiling of my common lisp code is one of the things that keeps me on lisp vs. other dynamic languages.

For all the above reasons (and of course the obvious ones as well), it's a very positive sign for Zig that Andrew's day-job now is working on Zig. As a systems programmer, I do find it exciting, though I lack the time to spend on it currently (my first foray ran into a compiler bug after having written less than 100 LoC, which may have been coincidental, but certainly discouraged me from spending more time with it).

Re: Zig's New Relationship with LLVM

#34

Post by ifreund »

pjmlp wrote: post #30
someziguser wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Zig the source files you are importing are implicitly structs. Personally I find it better to keep it consistent, declaring it like any other struct with the use of a built-in function. I don't think there's any advantage to turning it to a typical module import statement given the underlying semantics.

So Zig won't support binary libraries?

It already does, dynamic linking is orthogonal to @import() semantics.

Re: Zig's New Relationship with LLVM

#37

Post by swsieber »

oshea64bit wrote: post #31
higerordermap wrote: post #3

I always like innovations in programming tooling. To me zig sounds like a system language written by system programmers, while rust is more influenced from FP and webdev communities, which is reflected in both tooling and language. To people asking why zig when there's rust, both are nice in different ways.

Maybe this is an ignorant question, but how exactly is Rust influenced by web dev? I don't see how the aspects that make Rust popular (ownership, lifetimes, strong type system etc.) contribute much to web dev in particular. Languages used for the web like JS, Python, Ruby seem popular precisely because they abstract lower-level details.

There's definitely influence from the package manager side. There's probably also the influence on the push for a strong WASM story.

Re: Zig's New Relationship with LLVM

#38

Post by ikskuh »

IshKebab wrote: post #2

This looks amazing, as do many of Zig's features (e.g. comptime). It's hard to go back to memory errors after Rust, but I hope Zig becomes popular enough with some people (those that don't care about security? maybe game developers?) that it influences future languages.

Zig is also designed around safety and security. It's not as obvious as with Rust, but it's still there.

Zig is way easier to verify than rust code (no hidden control flow, no hidden allocations that might fail, ...) which means a security expert can read a single function (without knowing more about the code) and can reason about that function.

This does not work in languages like C++ and Rust where RAII is a common pattern and code will be implicitly be executed when some objects go out of scope.

Yes, sure. Rust does a lot of verification work already, but so do tools like cppcheck and other verification tools and i'm sure those will emerge for Zig as well.

Zig (in contrast to C or Rust) has no warnings. Behaviours that might not be OK are compile errors and cannot be ignored. There are also plans (as in "not implemented yet") to forbid declaring unused variables and such so even this gets a compile error. This makes Zig also easy to reason about (seeing a variable declaration means that it's guaranteed to be used later)

Re: Zig's New Relationship with LLVM

#39

Post by sam0x17 »

viraptor wrote: post #28
johnnycerberus wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I like what Rust is trying to achieve, I would never use something that is not formally proven. There are many, many other static analysis tools in the C and Ada world that can achieve exactly the same thing. They imply less risk, they are way more mature (~40 yo) and have bigger communities around them. Zig is a better C and C++. It should be used accordingly. It will do well in game servers, simulation server…

> that can achieve exactly the same thing That's a bold claim. What's the C formal validator which automatically handles both memory management and concurrency in source of any size within seconds/minutes? (Without making the source its own dialect rather than C)

True, I'm familiar with ones in Java but not in C/C++. Having written a leak / double free detector for C, I have to say, you can only do so much statically and that wouldn't give me peace of mind exactly.

Re: Zig's New Relationship with LLVM

#40

Post by gravitas »

gravitas wrote: post #32

I see zig users commenting here -- the "getting started" guide at https://ziglearn.org/ immediately fails with the installable zig binary from Arch (0.6.0) due to https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/5683 I'd never heard of zig until now, but as a community having top level "how to get started" website using features only available from the Master branch of github is... not a good way to get people into your languag…

Similarly, I rolled back to the official docs from Master and the hello.zig from there is similarly nonop using the tagged 0.6.0 build: https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/

Please, please - make a Hello, World which is not so intrinsically tied to random features on Master to just work across all the iterations. Hello, World is supposed to be the simplest, non-breaking easy to compile no esoteric compiler feature thing in any programming language in the world.

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