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Assorted Thoughts on Zig and Rust

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Re: Assorted Thoughts on Zig and Rust

#81

Post by hxzhao »

pizza234 wrote: post #38

I think this an argument like the following is not really meaningful: > Most of this difference is not related to lifetimes. Rust has patterns, traits, dyn, modules, declarative macros, procedural macros, derive, associated types, annotations, cfg, cargo features, turbofish, autoderefencing, deref coercion etc Nobody forces beginners to write macros. Beginners are only macros _users_. With time and experience, the ne…

> Nobody forces beginners to write macros. Beginners are only macros _users_. With time and experience, the need for macros emerges by itself, then learning them is a natural part of the process. But even then, nobody is forced to write any.

I think one of the problems with this mindset is, you are only assuming the case with you have full control on the code-base e.g. writing thing from scratch so that you can only use those features in rust that you feel comfortable with, in other cases, you have little control on what others use.

Re: Assorted Thoughts on Zig and Rust

#82

Post by the_mitsuhiko »

pron wrote: post #70
the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #2

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.

My impression was completely the opposite. I was very excited about Rust at first, especially the ownership system, but after a while I saw that it was a cleaned-up C++ with most of C++'s problems (one of the most complex programming languages in software history; very slow feedback loop). Zig, on the other hand, seems revolutionary and a complete rethinking, from the ground-up, of what low-level programming should b…

Rust is trying to replace C++. If you were not in the market for C++ to begin with it's unlikely that Rust is going to excite you.

Re: Assorted Thoughts on Zig and Rust

#83

Post by mtzet »

steveklabnik wrote: post #77
martinhath wrote: post #61

This is a really great writeup! I was using Rust as my main programming language from some months before 1.0 up until maybe early 2019. I have only written somewhere in between 100 and 1k lines of Zig, but generally feel that I agree with most of what's being brought up here. Here's a mind dump: > Zig manages to provide many of the same features with a single mechanism - compile-time execution of regular zig code. Th…

(By the way, Hacker News doesn't support markdown; indent your code by two spaces, rather than using fences. https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc ) Just a few small things: > This is a huge one for me, and I really don't understand why Rust didn't jump on this earlier. Doing this well is not easy. Exposing a full language at compile time isn't a difficult feature, but doing compile-time execution in a sound, safe w…

> Doing this well is not easy

Does this also apply to the in-language build system? Given both Rust and Zig's ergonomics, it just seems so brilliantly simple (at least in hindsight) to let the build system be a library. Is it just coincidence that I've only heard of this approach for zig and Jonathan Blow's language, or is there a technical reason this is more difficult than it seems?

Re: Assorted Thoughts on Zig and Rust

#84

Post by fwsgonzo »

nimmer wrote: post #57

Pity that Nim was not part of the article.

It's weird because out of all the languages I have made a special environment for, Zig is the only one I couldn't figure out how to. For example, how to write global asm? How to call the Zig main function? I guess I need a trampoline? I have an emulated env with no filesystems and such things, where you just communicate using system calls - so nothing special, however since you can't just use the standard libraries I have to set the environment up myself. That is fine. It's also cross-compiled.

For rust I had to add some custom linker flags, use global_asm for the startup code, and then with no_std I could just call my own main function. The only really annoying part of the whole thing is that there is no feature in Rust to force a function to not be removed. I could override the global allocator to make allocations very fast.

For C/C++, it's the same as in Rust, except you can use __attribute__((used)) to make a function not get removed. It's also easy to override memory- and string-functions if you have system calls that do these things faster. Overall the C/C++ environment was the fastest.

For Nim, I only had to use C++ as a backend, and then call NimMain(), add a few extra flags, and it would just work. I only wish that Nim was more popular.

Re: Assorted Thoughts on Zig and Rust

#85

Post by gridlockd »

johnisgood wrote: post #29
lambda_dn wrote: post #11

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.

> The comptime feature is probably the most exciting thing I've seen in a while 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://rosetta…

> Just please do not make the mistake of believing that it is unique to Zig. Factor brings the best of Forth and Lisp together...

What is unique to Zig is that it has these features without bringing together "the best of Forth and Lisp". Sometimes, just being pedestrian is a virtue.

Re: Assorted Thoughts on Zig and Rust

#86

Post by gridlockd »

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #2

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 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.

Good! Maybe you can actually get something done using it then, instead of getting lost in mastering lots of concepts just for the sake of it.

Re: Assorted Thoughts on Zig and Rust

#87

Post by pron »

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #82
pron wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My impression was completely the opposite. I was very excited about Rust at first, especially the ownership system, but after a while I saw that it was a cleaned-up C++ with most of C++'s problems (one of the most complex programming languages in software history; very slow feedback loop). Zig, on the other hand, seems revolutionary and a complete rethinking, from the ground-up, of what low-level programming should b…

Rust is trying to replace C++. If you were not in the market for C++ to begin with it's unlikely that Rust is going to excite you.

That's one way of looking at it, but that I'm shopping for a C++ replacement doesn't mean I'll necessarily like another C++-like language. C++ is my primary language, and if I replace it -- given that switching a new language is very costly no matter which new language I pick -- I might as well wait for a more revolutionary replacement, that fixes all/most problems I have with it, rather than just a few. I don't know if Zig is that thing just yet, but it looks more promising -- to me, given my particular taste -- than Rust. But, TBF, I was very excited about Rust at first, so my excitement for Zig might wane as well.

Re: Assorted Thoughts on Zig and Rust

#88

Post by [deleted] »

gridlockd wrote: post #85
johnisgood wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The comptime feature is probably the most exciting thing I've seen in a while 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://rosetta…

> Just please do not make the mistake of believing that it is unique to Zig. Factor brings the best of Forth and Lisp together... What is unique to Zig is that it has these features without bringing together "the best of Forth and Lisp". Sometimes, just being pedestrian is a virtue.

[deleted]

Re: Assorted Thoughts on Zig and Rust

#89

Post by pron »

sacado2 wrote: post #68
lambda_dn wrote: post #11

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.

Yes. I think Zig is a safer C, while Rust is a safer C++. C programmers will be more excited by Zig than by rust, and the opposite is true for C++ afficionados.

Those are nice taglines, but while Rust is a safer C++ in the sense that it is a language that espouses C++'s design philosophy and has a similar feel to it, Zig is something new altogether. The only thing that makes it more similar to C than to C++ is that C is an extremely simple language, as is Zig, while C++ is an extremely complex language. But other than that, Zig is a low-level language that is its own family, and with a design that is radically different from either C or C++; it's hard to compare it to anything, really. Zig goes well beyond C in its power of abstraction to match C++/Rust, but it does so in a very different way than C++/Rust.

Re: Assorted Thoughts on Zig and Rust

#90

Post by coldtea »

flohofwoe wrote: post #64
coldtea wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am still torn about this. I can see the usefulness of it from python and go, but I also fear that it brings an unnecessary large maintenance burden. Http standards are evolving and soon the implementation will get stale, Why would it "get stale"? It doesn't get stale in Golang. If anything, being part of the standard library is a greater assurance for more eyes going into it, and not having it get stale, as oppos…

Keep in mind that a HTTP server is only useful for a subset of users, it might be an "obvious" requirement for you, but it definitely isn't for me ;) Features like this should go into libraries, but not the standard library. When looking for a Go or Python alternative, Zig doesn't immediately come to mind TBH. Also: Go (or python) has no UI system or 3D API wrapper in the standard library, but those are (probably) us…

>Keep in mind that a HTTP server is only useful for a subset of users, it might be an "obvious" requirement for you, but it definitely isn't for me ;)

Yes, but that "subset" is huge.

>Also: Go (or python) has no UI system or 3D API wrapper in the standard library, but those are (probably) useful for at least as many people as a HTTP server.

Not in the backend/network server world that Go primarily targets...

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