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Maintain It with Zig

kristoff.it

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Re: Maintain It with Zig

#81

Post by michaelsbradley »

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.

I think the maintainers of Nim would disagree with your assessment given that the first sentence on the front page of Nim's official website is:

"Nim is a statically typed compiled systems programming language."

As someone else pointed out, when using Nim with its ARC/ORC and move semantics (which will eventually be the default), it's closer to Rust than to Go.

That being said, Nim's current default GC does well for many kinds of workloads. If it's really causing a performance problem, it's possible to disable it and manage memory manually (or use a different language for the task at hand, of course).

Re: Maintain It with Zig

#82

Post by messe »

dleslie wrote: post #72
mishafb wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zig has painless cross compilation, with gcc or clang it's a nightmare

o.O Zig uses LLVM for cross compilation, and so does clang. It's really not any better. https://clang.llvm.org/docs/CrossCompilation.html

The part that Zig does well, is that it bundles C headers and standard library sources with it. This is the hard part of cross compilation. The default install can build standalone executables from C programs for any supported platform.

Re: Maintain It with Zig

#83

Post by messe »

dleslie wrote: post #75
williamstein wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

‘zig cc’ is more than that. You get a very powerful caching system, and built in support for cross compilation to a huge range of targets (via zig shipping with libc sources). Zig is extremely impressive.

The built in cross compilation is just LLVM; it's a narrower set of targets than GCC, and a _far_ narrower set of targets than where you'll find a C compiler. clang cross compilation is not really any harder, you just supply the -target flag.

> clang cross compilation is not really any harder, you just supply the -target flag.

Yes, but it doesn't bundle and automatically compile the appropriate C library for the platform. Zig does.

Re: Maintain It with Zig

#84

Post by goodpoint »

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.

Not at all: Nim always targeted system programming. Even before the new ARC/ORC, the GC was optional and done independently in each thread.

Re: Maintain It with Zig

#85

Post by wyldfire »

kristoff_it wrote: post #78
wyldfire wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gee, IIUC it looks like it's been addressed by offering a new allocator that's able to detect use-after-free.

To be fair this alone is nowhere near what Rust can do for you in terms of safety.

But Zig makes this tradeoff intentionally. By design.

Re: Maintain It with Zig

#86

Post by woodrowbarlow »

oconnor663 wrote: post #13
_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?

> Would it be fair to say that Zig is to C, what Rust is to C++? There's definitely something to that analogy, but I think it also misses a lot of really important details. For example, Zig has generics, which right off the bat makes it hard to say that it's "like C". Also Rust enforces memory safety, which isn't like C or C++.

i love that zig doesn't have a special syntax for generics, it just allows anything to be resolved at compile-time -- including types. which gives you generics 'for free'.

Re: Maintain It with Zig

#87

Post by nimmer »

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 targets all the architectures that GCC targets, including less common microcontrollers.

Re: Maintain It with Zig

#88

Post by dleslie »

messe wrote: post #82
dleslie wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

o.O Zig uses LLVM for cross compilation, and so does clang. It's really not any better. https://clang.llvm.org/docs/CrossCompilation.html

The part that Zig does well, is that it bundles C headers and standard library sources with it. This is the hard part of cross compilation. The default install can build standalone executables from C programs for any supported platform.

If someone wanted to package clang to do that, they could. They do, in fact, that's how clang cross compilation packages work.

But sure, to Zig's credit, they ship all the supported toolchains and so don't have many different cross compilation variants in the OS's package manager. But that's a bit like buying one of everything, even though you'll only use one or two.

Re: Maintain It with Zig

#89

Post by Ar-Curunir »

mumblemumble wrote: post #68
heavyset_go wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It seems, from looking at others' code, that there is a very strong temptation to lean on `unsafe` instead of figuring out how to solve a problem within the constraints it normally applies. Are you sure those examples of unsafe Rust code were written using unsafe in order to work around safety constraints due to difficulty? I ask because there are some very real and valid use cases for unsafe code in Rust that have…

Not sure at all - I have effectively zero working knowledge of Rust - and certainly not looking to second-guess people's motivations for using the feature. The big bias I'm working from here is that, as an outsider, I have a hard time reconciling all the big talk about how Rust makes it impossible to experience certain classes of bugs, with the existence of a known set of things that its type checker can't check, and…

No type checker can catch all buggy programs (that involve solving the halting problem). In practice, Rust strikes a good balance: in over 120,000 LoC of Rust code that I have helped write and maintain, we have maybe 10 lines of unsafe, with performance matching or exceeding that of the C/C++ counterparts.

Re: Maintain It with Zig

#90

Post by pharke »

I prefer D, it can be fully compatible with C, the syntax is easy to learn if you've used any of the C family you already know 80%, the package system is simple, modules mean no more headers or include statements just import things where and when you need them, supports every style of programming, QOL improvements like ranges and foreach, proper strings, optional garbage collector, has a long history of continuous improvement and support. To me it's the clear choice if I'm going to rewrite an old C project since I can mostly just copy paste the old code and it runs, after which I can clean it up and simplify it using the new features mentioned. Oh! and integrated unit tests and documentation generation are superb. Helpful error messages too. I could go on but I'd prefer everyone just try it out and see for themselves.

https://dlang.org/

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