21–30 of 307 posts
> Both languages will insert implicit casts between primitive types whenever it is safe to do so, and require explicit casts otherwise. I think Rust always requires explicit casts. It's a bit annoying tbh - especially for array indexing - indexing with a u8, u16 or u32 should always be fine but you still have to do `as usize`.
I enjoy Rust and have been writing it for quite some time. However, I feel like server side languages still have a long way to go. Client-side languages in comparison have been only growing better (one could make a lot of negative points about TypeScript and node in general, but the ecosystem is a joy to work with). I feel like this is because people have accepted C and C++ with their respective pain points for close…
> node ... the ecosystem is a joy to work with I'm not entirely sure I've heard anyone express this before. What do you like about it?
> Both languages will insert implicit casts between primitive types whenever it is safe to do so, and require explicit casts otherwise. I think Rust always requires explicit casts. It's a bit annoying tbh - especially for array indexing - indexing with a u8, u16 or u32 should always be fine but you still have to do `as usize`.
Edit: But as the reply below says, please don't.
I enjoy Rust and have been writing it for quite some time. However, I feel like server side languages still have a long way to go. Client-side languages in comparison have been only growing better (one could make a lot of negative points about TypeScript and node in general, but the ecosystem is a joy to work with). I feel like this is because people have accepted C and C++ with their respective pain points for close…
I remain to be convinced that this is possible.
Rust's ownership model exerts huge design pressure on its standard library. There are some parts that just wouldn't work without ownership (like guards), and many that are far less ergonomic than they could be with GC (like iterators).
If you make a language GC by default with opt-in ownership, what does your standard library look like? It either isn't usable in ownership code, or it's crippled for GC code.
I quite honestly wonder sometimes why Rust excited me so much when I first started using it, but I do not get such excitement from Zig. Nowadays it's very easy to be excited about Rust because it demonstrated that ownership works but when I started using it, there was still garbage collection etc. Zig looks really cool but it feels like it has a high chance of being a niche language. Rust never felt like that.
I think Zig's biggest advantage is that it's just C without the warts, or footguns as is said in the Zig world. The comptime feature is probably the most exciting thing I've seen in a while. I've looked at Rust and feel it's more of a competitor to C++, Java and C#. Whereas Zig is C done right.
I quite honestly wonder sometimes why Rust excited me so much when I first started using it, but I do not get such excitement from Zig. Nowadays it's very easy to be excited about Rust because it demonstrated that ownership works but when I started using it, there was still garbage collection etc. Zig looks really cool but it feels like it has a high chance of being a niche language. Rust never felt like that.
For me personally, Rust was a challenge . Most programming languages are more or less the same. But Rust forced me to think in a way I've never encountered before. I guess this is also why many people like it.
Looks like there's active work going into it (1) (2), but Zig's lack of built-in http library has been a showstopper for me. I've had a few small side projects I wanted to do which involved exposing an API. (1) https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/910 (2) https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/2007
I think Zig's biggest advantage is that it's just C without the warts, or footguns as is said in the Zig world. The comptime feature is probably the most exciting thing I've seen in a while. I've looked at Rust and feel it's more of a competitor to C++, Java and C#. Whereas Zig is C done right.
Just please do not make the mistake of believing that it is unique to Zig. Factor brings the best of Forth and Lisp together, so meta-programming or extending the language is possible quite easily, for example. You could extend the syntax or add constructs pretty easily, and so forth. Anyways, an example can be found here: https://rosettacode.org/wiki/Compile-time_calculation#Factor but this barely scratches the surface. It does not mention `>` which evaluates some code at parse time. You can execute code before the words in a source file are compiled.
https://docs.factorcode.org/content/article-literals.html
https://docs.factorcode.org/content/article-syntax-literals....
https://docs.factorcode.org/content/article-syntax-immediate...
https://docs.factorcode.org/content/word-flags{,literals.htm...
I remember when I did something like:
SYMBOL: aligned-16-char
>align 16 >>align-first ;
char lookup-c-type clone 16-byte-alignment \ aligned-16-char typedef
>>
You could use it in a struct like:
STRUCT: foo
{ bar aligned-16-char[16] } ;
>
And of course you do not have to do stack shuffling at all, you can easily use locals which is useful for math equations and whatnot. Plus did you know that the Factor compiler supports advanced compiler optimizations that take advantage of the type information it can glean from source code? The typed vocabulary (yes, it is not part of the language, but implemented as a vocab) provides syntax that allows words to provide checked type information about their inputs and outputs and improve the performance of compiled code.
I would like to repeat because if this was not the case, I would have never bothered with it: you can create a single executable file that is less than 4 MB of size if you wish so! Of course it encourages interactive development, but still, it is great to have an optimizing compiler that can do all this easily. And mind you, this part is also written in Factor itself and is available as a vocabulary (vocab).
[1] There is a vocabulary named io.monitors and loaded source files across all vocabulary roots are monitored for changes. You can read more about it here: https://docs.factorcode.org/content/article-vocabs.refresh.h...
---
So all in all, I think Factor is great. I was shocked at how modern (and how many) libraries it has, especially considering only a handful of people have been working on it. Slava Pestov created the language, and some people joined him later on. If you want to learn more about it, start here: https://concatenative.org/wiki/view/Factor. There are videos, there are papers, there are lots of resources to get started. :) The language misses a couple of things, but it is being worked on.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
While Zig is an awesome project I feel a little bit the same. My two cents are that it is because Zig, as innovative as it is, has nothing that other languages couldn't copy or assimilate. With Rust it is a different story, because the ownership model cannot be plugged into other languages without changing them fundamentally. My prediction is similar to yours that Zig will be an important research project but not go…
Rust and Zig target different audiences though. It's often been said before, but Rust is mainly a C++ replacement, while Zig is mainly a C replacement. I have switched from C++ as my default-language to C a few years ago, and having dabbled a bit in both, I feel a lot more attracted to Zig than Rust for future projects (and mostly for the same reasons why I switched from C++ to C). If Zig can settle in the niche that…
That niche is "code that needs to be portable to any system with a C compiler", or "... to a particular system that only has a C compiler" so i am not sure it can.
There are lots of projects using C that aren't in that niche, but i don't believe there is a good reason for any of them to be using C over C++ these days. It's either history, inertia, or Luddism.