171–180 of 286 posts
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yet.
One could say the same thing about Rust, and at least that language has hit 1.0.
Zig is a very interesting language. You are able to do thing that would require wizard level skills in C with simple plain language construct. Like serializing/deserializing an enum variants over the wire for example in the most efficient way (look at std.json.{parser, stringify} [0]). > soon we’ll also have a package manager This. If they succeed to do this (and I have my doubts) it will be a paradigm shift for low-…
> Let's hope this is not vaporware. I sincerely approve of the skepticism. I can assure you there is already a very large fire under my ass to get this shipped. To provide some more context, here is a snippet from the latest release notes[0]: > Having a package manager built into the Zig compiler is a long-anticipated feature. Zig 0.8.0 does not have this feature. > If the package manager works well, people will use…
Zig is a very interesting language. You are able to do thing that would require wizard level skills in C with simple plain language construct. Like serializing/deserializing an enum variants over the wire for example in the most efficient way (look at std.json.{parser, stringify} [0]). > soon we’ll also have a package manager This. If they succeed to do this (and I have my doubts) it will be a paradigm shift for low-…
> Let's hope this is not vaporware. I sincerely approve of the skepticism. I can assure you there is already a very large fire under my ass to get this shipped. To provide some more context, here is a snippet from the latest release notes[0]: > Having a package manager built into the Zig compiler is a long-anticipated feature. Zig 0.8.0 does not have this feature. > If the package manager works well, people will use…
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You are talking about the simplicity of a line of code. The topic being discussed, though, was the simplicity of the language itself .
The simplicity of the language is directly correlated to the simplicity of that line. The fact that the language makes relationships between inputs and outputs explicit is a feature of the language, because of its borrow checker, at the expense of being syntactically verbose compared to C.
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You care because you need to have a c compiler installed, as well as the libc stuff… It is a giant pain to do so in some circumstances. One less dependency is a good thing. I quoted from cc’s readme above.
100% of platforms that Zig & Rust run on already have a C compiler installed, though. A c compiler being present is the baseline assumption. If Zig existed in places C doesn't and I wanted to write C for that platform then having Zig CC would be an advantage. But such a situation doesn't currently exist and seems unlikely to ever exist? Especially in the context of a library/module porting to Zig or Rust piecemeal, t…
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> I've always tried as much as possible to treat strings as just opaque data and never look into them, which tends to work well, but in some domains you really need to look at and massage the characters/codepoints/grapheme clusters, and the lack of a first-citizen UTF-8-aware string type is, I think, a bit unfortunate in this day and age. You don't need a string type for that, you just need routines that handle UTF-8…
Sure, you're not wrong. For my purposes that'd work, but I'm of the opinion that delegating that to an optional library will make a lot of developers lazy and not even bother thinking about Unicode/i18n/l10n issues at all. I've seen so much code, in a multitude of languages that is oblivious to it, but even if it's reified in a type or even having some form of language support, I guess you can argue that people can s…
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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…
I rewrote 'leakdice' as part of learning Rust, so arguably that doesn't count (though I had never rewritten a program to learn a previous language), and 'misfortunate' wouldn't make sense in unsafe languages so that doesn't count either, but I then also immediately began rewriting 4store in Rust.
I had never been compelled to rewrite stuff in other languages I learned. I am a compulsive programmer, so I did write stuff in languages I learned, (the other day I re-discovered, via an enquiry to a very old email address, that I used to know Scheme, as evidenced by the fact I wrote some Scheme that they were asking about from last century) but I didn't rewrite anything until I learned Rust.
C. Go. Python. Java. PHP. Bash. Perl. C#. Early C++. I'm sure there are many more. But always new things, either because the language afforded something I hadn't considered before or more often I wanted something and I chose a languages I knew would be able to achieve it. That's why I wrote some PHP less than a year ago, I'm not proud of that, but PHP got the job done so that's what I did. I can report that modern PHP is merely a bad idea, like Javascript, which I probably forgot to list above.
Anyway with Rust I not only wanted to write new low-level code in Rust, I looked again at C programs I use and thought, "I should rewrite that in Rust". It felt like a good idea, and I expect to follow through on it at least somewhat, let's see how long 4store takes.
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I've been toying with Zig over the summer, and I'm really impressed by the build system, general ergonomics and the explicitness of the language. The only thing I've found being a pain point is C's biggest pain point: the lack of a proper string type. Even though I've worked for years in the past with C and C++, I still get tripped up, and in Zig I keep on being confused whether I should use raw byte arrays, or senti…
Note that while strings are generally opaque bytes in Zig, there are standard library functions[0] to work with them as Unicode codepoints and such. But Unicode is quite large and complicated, and things like grapheme clusters aren't in the standard library (yet?). I also believe that that module is planned to be rewritten. So it's more the case that Zig plans to someday support Unicode at the standard library level,…
I have this internally in my lang AST Rust
Utf8
struct City {
name:Utf8
}
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
And I'm one that will be super-happy if all C/C++ code in the world dissapear now and be replace by Pascal/Rust/Zig/D/anything else that is better.
MOST of my troubles are because C/C++. And the worst ones. Even if I 'm in a environment (business apps, ERps) where in theory system lang concerns are a distant worry.
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> Let's hope this is not vaporware. I sincerely approve of the skepticism. I can assure you there is already a very large fire under my ass to get this shipped. To provide some more context, here is a snippet from the latest release notes[0]: > Having a package manager built into the Zig compiler is a long-anticipated feature. Zig 0.8.0 does not have this feature. > If the package manager works well, people will use…
> ...I can assure you there is already a very large fire under my ass to get this shipped ... [followed by a short, easy-to-follow explanation as to why it's taking so long] I'm going to check out Zig because of your response. I love coming across comments like this one on HN.
I wrote about cross-compiling to a raspberry-pi and writing a barebones driver for an OLED display[^1]
That was a lot of fun despite the fact the code was incredibly basic. The interop with C was effortless.
[^1] https://www.kamelasa.dev/posts/gettin-ziggy-with-it-pi-zero....