Zig's New Relationship with LLVM • Hacker News Board

Re: Zig's New Relationship with LLVM

#151

Post by minxomat » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 4:32 PM UTC

gravitas wrote: post #54

kristoff_it wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use std.debug.warn and you'll be fine with 0.6.0 and master. Right now there's no strict and methodical update path from one version to the next, but generally speaking changes to the language get special-cased into zig fmt. For example the current `anytype` type has replaced `var` and running zig fmt on a project I hadn't updated yet changed all references. That said, Hello World, when taken seriously, it's not that…

Thank you (for both replies) and to everyone else, this makes it crystal clear what's going on - there's a lack of "hey everyone, this is very unstable at the moment and the basic internals are changing, using anything except the latest Github builds is highly discouraged" which might really help when added to the various places above. I'm a toe-dipper -- I need to run and play with some sample code (basic Hello, Wor…

For a while there was a link to TIO (tio.run) on the zig homepage where you could play with it online. But for some reason it has been removed.

Re: Zig's New Relationship with LLVM

#152

Post by setpatchaddress » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 4:36 PM UTC

fanf2 wrote: post #111

dnautics wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I really like the Zig approach of improving the tooling for manual memory management rather than replacing manual memory management. The new test allocator checks your code for memory leaks, use after free, and double free in a highly ergonomic fashion. I think is fantastic that zig encourages writing tests, and I think if you get full test coverage in your zig code with the test allocator, you will probably solve…

Address Sanitizer and valgrind are widely-used standard tools for finding allocation bugs

They are very effective, but relatively difficult to use.

Re: Zig's New Relationship with LLVM

#153

Post by cgh » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 4:39 PM UTC

higerordermap wrote: post #56

kristoff_it wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Zig will reserve a few interesting surprises also in the webdev world, it just needs a bit more time to get there.

I don't think zig is very well suited for / should target web dev. There a GC'd language with modern features should do best. Imagine OCaml but modern and great tooling. That would be easy for developers, more productive to write, less type errors, also more productive because of IDE support, and much faster than current crop of scripting languages. Sadly, there is a vacuum for such a language. Go is too gruntwork an…

Kotlin seems to fit what you're asking for? And so does modern Java, to be honest.

Re: Zig's New Relationship with LLVM

#154

Post by coldtea » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 4:40 PM UTC

simias wrote: post #49

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.

Can you explain what you have in mind exactly? I'm very much a system programmer and very much not a webdev and I'm basically in love with Rust, so I'm not really sure why you feel that way. I admit that I don't know much about Zig and it does seem like a very interesting language, but at a glance it seems to me like the type system is significantly weaker than Rust's (which may be a good thing for compile times). Fo…

>Can you explain what you have in mind exactly? I'm very much a system programmer and very much not a webdev and I'm basically in love with Rust, so I'm not really sure why you feel that way.

Probably that Zig is a systems programming language from/for people who understand and appreciate C - not C++/FP/etc...

Re: Zig's New Relationship with LLVM

#155

Post by sai_c » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 4:42 PM UTC

cashsterling wrote: post #148

sai_c wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point in time, i agree with this analysis. But what for a C programmer (systems/embedded) remains to be seen, is, if any of the new languages (say for example Rust, Zig, Odin) can (or want to) offer one of C's strengths most language designers do not think of (at least it looks to me like that). And this would be for me "leave the language alone (for the most part)". If i may quote from Zig's website ( https:…

My 0.02... and have an upvote for stating your opinion. C is not going any where.. we all know that. But it is not the best tool for accomplishing many systems programming tasks. IMO, this has probably been true since Ada95. Ada2012/SPARK, Rust, and probably Zig make this even more clear. For some domains, C was the ONLY tool available... e.g. C is/was the only language with board-level support and an available compi…

Yes indeed, Ada/SPARK would be better suited, but suffer (unfortunately) from a hefty price tag, not every shop is willing to pay. Especially if there are no lifes at stake should your software crash.

Rust has the (imo) above stated problem. Also, if you avoid dynamic allocation, Rust's advantages are not as compelling in the real world as advertised (personal opinion). They are there, but IMO minor.

The problem right now is that we have a chicken and egg problem. You said you work in embedded too, so you know MCU bugs exist. Use anything but the "recommended" tool chain, and the compilers will be blamed, no matter how much proof you have that it is the MCU.

Don't get me wrong, i'm definitely keeping an eye on Zig. There is lots to be liked. I cited that its goal is keeping the language simple. But only time will tell if the developers can keep up to this promise. I, personally, don't trust languages developed by communities in this regard. Reality has (sadly) proven me right.

Re: Zig's New Relationship with LLVM

#156

Post by sai_c » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 4:45 PM UTC

tutfbhuf wrote: post #143

sai_c wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point in time, i agree with this analysis. But what for a C programmer (systems/embedded) remains to be seen, is, if any of the new languages (say for example Rust, Zig, Odin) can (or want to) offer one of C's strengths most language designers do not think of (at least it looks to me like that). And this would be for me "leave the language alone (for the most part)". If i may quote from Zig's website ( https:…

I think people like you are the last one to adopt. Only when a new language is battle tested and has been around for at least two decades, with an language update rate equal or smaller than Go, only then you might want to consider it for your next embedded system. New languages invocations are by definition of new not for you, fair enough.

Yes, this is my experience as well.

On the other hand if you change the language, say every two years, when is the right point to dive in? Is it at some point (say i missed the last four years of language development) hopeless to catch up?

Re: Zig's New Relationship with LLVM

#157

Post by IshKebab » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 4:46 PM UTC

pron wrote: post #105

nyanpasu64 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a Zig user, but this seems to indicate Zig still doesn't always detect use-after-free even with all safety flags on. It seems progress is being made though. https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/3180

You are correct, that's still a WIP, but the goal is to have "safe Zig" (i.e. Zig with safety checks on) catch all undefined behaviour modulo explicitly marked unsafe casts (which correspond to unsafe Rust code).

That sounds great as long as the performance cost is not too high.

Re: Zig's New Relationship with LLVM

#158

Post by dasb » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 4:51 PM UTC

I want to like Zig, but I just hate the

    {var | const } identifier : type

syntax.

I know it's an extremely superficial observation, but it just doesn't feel good to me.

Re: Zig's New Relationship with LLVM

#159

Post by alexhutcheson » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 4:53 PM UTC

cashsterling wrote: post #148

sai_c wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point in time, i agree with this analysis. But what for a C programmer (systems/embedded) remains to be seen, is, if any of the new languages (say for example Rust, Zig, Odin) can (or want to) offer one of C's strengths most language designers do not think of (at least it looks to me like that). And this would be for me "leave the language alone (for the most part)". If i may quote from Zig's website ( https:…

My 0.02... and have an upvote for stating your opinion. C is not going any where.. we all know that. But it is not the best tool for accomplishing many systems programming tasks. IMO, this has probably been true since Ada95. Ada2012/SPARK, Rust, and probably Zig make this even more clear. For some domains, C was the ONLY tool available... e.g. C is/was the only language with board-level support and an available compi…

The low cost of porting a C toolchain to a new platform is a feature of C. Arguably, it's one of C's two remaining "killer apps" that keep it in use. The other is that C is the "universal recipient" language for FFI - it's easy to call C functions from almost any other language (but not vice-versa).

It's currently much more expensive to port an Ada, Rust, or even C++ toolchain to a new platform, so I'd expect C to continue to be dominant on lower-spec chips. Here's a previous comment adding a bit more technical detail to that argument: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22822931

Re: Zig's New Relationship with LLVM

#160

Post by dnautics » Mon, Sep 28, 2020, 4:53 PM UTC

sai_c wrote: post #133

pron wrote: post #52

Zig is one of the most interesting languages I've seen in a very long time, and possibly the first radical breakthrough in low-level programming design in decades. Maybe it will become a big success and maybe it will tank, but after having two visions for low-level programming -- that of C's "syntax-sugared Assembly", or that of C++'s "zero-cost abstractions" whose low-level, low-abstraction code appears high level o…

At this point in time, i agree with this analysis. But what for a C programmer (systems/embedded) remains to be seen, is, if any of the new languages (say for example Rust, Zig, Odin) can (or want to) offer one of C's strengths most language designers do not think of (at least it looks to me like that). And this would be for me "leave the language alone (for the most part)". If i may quote from Zig's website ( https:…

I am an old c-head (actually pascal was my first compiled language) and I remember in the early aughts writing vtables manually in C because I didn't trust what I couldn't see in c++ (I'm also pushing 40)

I have to say, zig really captures this feel. The only places where it gets a tiny bit strange in the way you complain about is comptime, but imo it is a very good trade-off for ditching the preprocessor and ditching make. And anyways comptime is far more easy to reason about than some of the mangled ways in which people who use C (in prod) use preprocessor: It took me weeks to understand the ffi header file for the erlang VM, for example. Three languages for the price of 1.25. not bad.