Best alternative to C, built with solid foundation to ensure fast compile speed, fast iteration, and easy to maintain code
I don't understand why people want fast compile speeds so much. My day job is/was writing C on something that requires 30+ minutes for one compilation run. It feels like people want fast compilation speeds because they need to keep running their software for some reason. Fast compilation speeds are a nice to have but basically irrelevant for normal developing of software in my experience.
I like knowing what compiler errors I've made in near real time feedback. Also useful for running tests on save.
Zig uses manual memory management too (even more manual than Rust), so that's a bit strange question.
It's really easy in Zig to be honest. Just put `defer thing.deinit()` in the right scope and you're done. You gain explicitness and know exactly what's going on in your Code. Everything is obvious. That's the reason Zig is so incredible simple and easy to read. Zig also has a GPA that will tell you about memory leaks or anything.
And in rust you just put `` in the right scope and you're done. This is perfectly explicit and you know exactly what's going on in your code. Everything is obvious.
I disagree. It is substantially and unequivocally better to hold onto memory until the end of scope than to leak memory by default. How can anyone argue that leaking memory is a better default? That’s a ticking time bomb. Maybe someone is so optimistic as to believe they’ll catch every leak before shipping new code? You can easily add a manual “drop” call in Rust at any point if you want to force an allocation to be…
I’ve recently been writing personal code that leaks like a sieve. It’s just not worth my time to find every leak when the lifetime of the process is finite and short and it will only ever run on a machine with gigs of memory. I haven’t thought through your question enough but maybe a situation where memory usage would be super high if waiting until the end of scope? I’m probably trying to hard to come up with a situa…
> I’m probably trying to hard to come up with a situation but I have a gut feeling that freeing mid scope is important under certain circumstances to keep the code simple and understandable.
I explained in my previous comment that you can explicitly "drop" any value at any time in Rust, if you choose.[0] But if you don't, it will still be dropped at the end of the scope. The developer has control, but the language will watch your back.
It's funny i came to Rust from Go, Python, NodeJS, etc after a combined .. 15 years or so. I've been using Rust full time (work & home) for ~2 years now. Obviously i'm biased, but i quite enjoy it. I find i am more efficient now than before, because it manages to give me the ease of the "easier" languages quite often with a rich set of tooling when i need to go deeper. Personally i feel the concern over the borrow ch…
The perspective of someone who is learning Rust (but not professionally) during the last few months. : - The borrow checker is one of the easier parts of Rust to grok, it's just as you say, not that complicated in the end. - Traits are more annoying to understand and find in source code when they can get added from anywhere, and suddenly you code gets extra functionality, or it's missing the right one unless you impo…
`rust-analyzer` lets you find the trait/impl that provides a method, if you don't have it in your IDE you should get it.
I disagree. It is substantially and unequivocally better to hold onto memory until the end of scope than to leak memory by default. How can anyone argue that leaking memory is a better default? That’s a ticking time bomb. Maybe someone is so optimistic as to believe they’ll catch every leak before shipping new code? You can easily add a manual “drop” call in Rust at any point if you want to force an allocation to be…
Of course you can call drop() manually, but almost nobody does or even think about it because that's not the way you program in a language with RAII. Don't get me wrong. I do think that rust and c++ RAII is much more convenient and safe than the C or Zig way. (I'd even prefer if you could annotate given struct in rust so the compiler could drop them as soon as it's no longer used, but that s not that simple)
I still don't get why one should do that in the first place
Congratulations with the milestone! Does using Zig over C++ lead to "less memory, and represents a modest performance"? Or was the C++ implementation a bit sloppy? (lacking data oriented design for instance) Also, what specifically are you most excited using Zig for?
Thanks :) The new Zig implementation is certainly more well designed than the C++ implementation, for several reasons: * It's the second implementation of the language * It did not have to survive as much evolution and language churn * I leveled up as a programmer over the last 7 years * The Zig language safety and debugging features make it possible to do things I would never dream of attempting in C++ for fear of f…
> * a Digital Audio Workstation
ORLY?
Maybe you can put together a better, faster team (like Presonus managed to do for Studio One), but most current DAWs have been in existence for 20 years or more. Catching up with that is a challenge, and if you don't catch up then it's an interesting toy or half-a-DAW.
Thanks :) The new Zig implementation is certainly more well designed than the C++ implementation, for several reasons: * It's the second implementation of the language * It did not have to survive as much evolution and language churn * I leveled up as a programmer over the last 7 years * The Zig language safety and debugging features make it possible to do things I would never dream of attempting in C++ for fear of f…
> * a Digital Audio Workstation Woah. A little bit ago I went to write a little tool that mucked with the FL Studio FLP format. It was easy enough to guess out the bits that I cared about, so I pretty much just did that using a couple quick projects with specific things in them. However, I did check to see if anyone else had mucked around with the FLP format, and couldn’t help but notice your name. Was pretty surpris…
> It took me so much effort to feel like I could understand FFTs enough to actually implement them.)
Do you understand how little DSP is involved in writing a DAW? It has almost nothing to do with DSP and everything to do with application architecture, data management, threading and more.
I disagree. It is substantially and unequivocally better to hold onto memory until the end of scope than to leak memory by default. How can anyone argue that leaking memory is a better default? That’s a ticking time bomb. Maybe someone is so optimistic as to believe they’ll catch every leak before shipping new code? You can easily add a manual “drop” call in Rust at any point if you want to force an allocation to be…
I’ve recently been writing personal code that leaks like a sieve. It’s just not worth my time to find every leak when the lifetime of the process is finite and short and it will only ever run on a machine with gigs of memory. I haven’t thought through your question enough but maybe a situation where memory usage would be super high if waiting until the end of scope? I’m probably trying to hard to come up with a situa…
Heck, this is the entire memory management model of PHP, which I found shocking when I learned it, but makes sense given that the language is intended to generate web pages: just allocate, never reclaim the memory, then kill the process when you’re done.
Thanks :) The new Zig implementation is certainly more well designed than the C++ implementation, for several reasons: * It's the second implementation of the language * It did not have to survive as much evolution and language churn * I leveled up as a programmer over the last 7 years * The Zig language safety and debugging features make it possible to do things I would never dream of attempting in C++ for fear of f…
> * a Digital Audio Workstation Woah. A little bit ago I went to write a little tool that mucked with the FL Studio FLP format. It was easy enough to guess out the bits that I cared about, so I pretty much just did that using a couple quick projects with specific things in them. However, I did check to see if anyone else had mucked around with the FLP format, and couldn’t help but notice your name. Was pretty surpris…
It's a fun exercise to implement FFT and other DSP algorithms, but for real-world software please stick to true and tested libraries like FFTW or FFTPACK instead of your own naïve implementation.
I’ve recently been writing personal code that leaks like a sieve. It’s just not worth my time to find every leak when the lifetime of the process is finite and short and it will only ever run on a machine with gigs of memory. I haven’t thought through your question enough but maybe a situation where memory usage would be super high if waiting until the end of scope? I’m probably trying to hard to come up with a situa…
Heck, this is the entire memory management model of PHP, which I found shocking when I learned it, but makes sense given that the language is intended to generate web pages: just allocate, never reclaim the memory, then kill the process when you’re done.
Do you have any sources? Maybe some truly ancient version? PHP has done garbage collection (seemingly mixed with some reference counting, like Python) for at least 10 or 15 years... I didn't bother to keep searching for even older information, but nothing I saw indicated that PHP only released memory when the process for a request exited.
I don't even think most mainstream uses of PHP have done the process-per-request model for decades, but I could be wrong.