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Maintain It with Zig

kristoff.it

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Re: Maintain It with Zig

#21

Post by void_mint »

rattray wrote: post #16
_6pvr wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been paying attention to Zig posts on HN, mostly just because it seems well-liked and I think Andrew Kelley is interesting/smart. Would it be fair to say that Zig is to C, what Rust is to C++? Or are they both just kind of...low-ish-level systems languages solving similar problems, differently?

I think they solve some similar and some different problems, with some similarities and differences! The biggest difference in the problems they solve, in my view, is that Zig does not aim for safety. It'll be easier to write safe programs yourself with Zig than it might be with C, but it doesn't give you any guarantees. Zig also seems like it may be a better fit for embedded programming; there's a big community arou…

Thanks for the response. I'm excited for as many viable alternatives to C/C++ as we can get.

Re: Maintain It with Zig

#22

Post by kristoff_it »

steveklabnik wrote: post #12

Agreed for sure that working with C and C++ is the only way forward for systems languages. Rust's expression of this is the zero-cost C FFI, using native platform tooling, and stuff like that. Rust was never about re-writing the world, after all, its reason for existing was to eventually improve Firefox. The very first presentation about Rust ( http://venge.net/graydon/talks/intro-talk-2.pdf ) says "We are not “rewri…

Not sure if this transpired in the writing, but my interpretation of RIIR, partially informed by the chat with JT [0], is that this is a sentiment that I guess is there in some people, but that it was never something officially sanctioned.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7ny7Qrsbd8&t=5391s

Re: Maintain It with Zig

#23

Post by losvedir »

The build tooling of Zig is very impressive. I'm a sponsor of the project not necessarily because of the language itself, but because it surely has the potential to make waves in some way or another (edit: though the language itself is also quite interesting).

One thing I wish the blog post had brought up is testing! Zig has some great tooling around tests, and that is something sorely lacking in a lot of C projects. If nothing else, you can pretty easily use Zig to simply write some tests for a C project! Even that would be a big improvement to the ecosystem.

Re: Maintain It with Zig

#24

Post by steveklabnik »

kristoff_it wrote: post #22
steveklabnik wrote: post #12

Agreed for sure that working with C and C++ is the only way forward for systems languages. Rust's expression of this is the zero-cost C FFI, using native platform tooling, and stuff like that. Rust was never about re-writing the world, after all, its reason for existing was to eventually improve Firefox. The very first presentation about Rust ( http://venge.net/graydon/talks/intro-talk-2.pdf ) says "We are not “rewri…

Not sure if this transpired in the writing, but my interpretation of RIIR, partially informed by the chat with JT [0], is that this is a sentiment that I guess is there in some people, but that it was never something officially sanctioned. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7ny7Qrsbd8&t=5391s

It is a weird self-fulfilling thing. People talk about it like it's a thing, so it's a thing, even if there's very little actual evidence of anyone sincerely holding this belief. People repeat that there's this plague of folks requesting that projects be re-written, and while it is literally true that I have seen two or three instances of this (you link to one of them, and notably it is not anyone harassing maintainers about their choices), it's been two or three.

I actually got annoyed with this enough that I started doing a quantitative analysis; if you look at the canonical repository tracking this, it's got 44 total issues, most of which are jokes https://github.com/ansuz/RIIR/issues If you search GitHub for issues with these words in it, you get some, but many are either obvious jokes, people making issues on their own projects to think about doing this, and things like that. I never followed through on collecting it into a blog post though.

I didn't think your writing was inappropriate at all; memes are memes, and I'm convinced that this one is just never going to die, because it's taken a life of its own, regardless of the underlying truth or not. It is always worth pushing back on this sentiment, even if I don't think Rust specifically tends to actually embody that sentiment very much.

(Also: I don't know why you're now being downvoted. Hacker News works in mysterious ways.)

Re: Maintain It with Zig

#25

Post by hitekker »

> To improve our critical infrastructure we must improve the developer experience (DX) of systems programming, but rewriting everything is not the only answer.

I like Kristoff from what I've read of him. He seems like a leader who will take responsibility and not shy away from hard decisions.

On that quality alone, my money is on Zig winning systems programming over Rust in 10 years.

Re: Maintain It with Zig

#26

Post by sa1 »

habibur wrote: post #7
sandwichbop wrote: post #2

Interesting read and I agree that growth in technical debt is something to worry about. I want to get more involved and been trying my best to learn the skills needed but there’s so much to consider that it’s a bit overwhelming. I’m not familiar with Zig, it’s neat that it has a toolchain that can compile C/C++ but it reminds me a lot of Nim. Could someone explain to me some differences between the two and why you wo…

Nim is garbage collected, thus is a higher level language but doesn't fit the high performance low overhead of "systems programming" requirement. While Zig is manual memory managed like C and nearer to the core, but harder to program.

With ARC, Nim's memory management would be closer to Rust than to Go.

Re: Maintain It with Zig

#27

Post by [deleted] »

vlovich123 wrote: post #20

> added a Rust dependency which in turn changed the list of supported platforms My understanding is that `zig cc`/`zig c++` are thin wrappers around LLVM, so doesn't that just reintroduce the same problem?

[deleted]

Re: Maintain It with Zig

#28

Post by kristoff_it »

steveklabnik wrote: post #24
kristoff_it wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if this transpired in the writing, but my interpretation of RIIR, partially informed by the chat with JT [0], is that this is a sentiment that I guess is there in some people, but that it was never something officially sanctioned. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7ny7Qrsbd8&t=5391s

It is a weird self-fulfilling thing. People talk about it like it's a thing, so it's a thing, even if there's very little actual evidence of anyone sincerely holding this belief. People repeat that there's this plague of folks requesting that projects be re-written, and while it is literally true that I have seen two or three instances of this (you link to one of them, and notably it is not anyone harassing maintaine…

Looking forward to when we get our own unfounded never-dying meme :^)

Re: Maintain It with Zig

#29

Post by masklinn »

nrclark wrote: post #15
_6pvr wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been paying attention to Zig posts on HN, mostly just because it seems well-liked and I think Andrew Kelley is interesting/smart. Would it be fair to say that Zig is to C, what Rust is to C++? Or are they both just kind of...low-ish-level systems languages solving similar problems, differently?

I think that's correct with some overlap, yes. Zig's explicit goal - as stated by the creator - is to replace C. Nothing more, nothing less. I feel like Rust wants to replace C but it also wants to replace C++. And given the complexity difference between the two languages, that means that Rust will end up closer to C++ than to C. So there's some overlap based on how Rust positions itself, but not based on how Zig pos…

> I feel like Rust wants to replace C but it also wants to replace C++.

Rust wants to make systems programming memory safe (and type safe while at it). It's not really about any specific language, it's about dragging the field forwards on the safety front.

Well it's not really Rust, it's the Rust community, which kinda wrestled it away from Graydon Hoare: the original inception of Rust was more of an applications language (what with the evented model and the split stack and the planned-though-never-really-implemented GC'd pointers) — which explains part of the historical confusion with / comparison to Go.

But then a critical mass of people took a look at this early rust and figured "we've got plenty of memory-safe and type-safe (ish) languages for applications, but this thing has precise control over memory and lifetimes and shit, we could actually build reliable infrastructure with that", and it coincided with a lot of memory safety issues news (which has been continuing ever since), and the rest is history, pretty much.

Re: Maintain It with Zig

#30

Post by skybrian »

vlovich123 wrote: post #20

> added a Rust dependency which in turn changed the list of supported platforms My understanding is that `zig cc`/`zig c++` are thin wrappers around LLVM, so doesn't that just reintroduce the same problem?

Yes, if you exclusively use Zig to build the code. But on an platform that Zig doesn’t support, you could write your own makefile instead to compile the C code with the native compiler, so the situation seems a bit better than with Rust?
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