11–20 of 104 posts
Cool article. I can't figure out why i am supposed to care about zig beyond it's fun? I get that it's interesting and more safe than C (honestly though what the hell isn 't). Say you write rust pretty regularly for new product development, what does zig offer to make my life better, my products more stable, etc?
Cool article. I can't figure out why i am supposed to care about zig beyond it's fun? I get that it's interesting and more safe than C (honestly though what the hell isn 't). Say you write rust pretty regularly for new product development, what does zig offer to make my life better, my products more stable, etc?
==========
Why Zig When There is Already C++, D, and Rust?
- No hidden control flow. If Zig code doesn’t look like it’s jumping away to call a function, then it isn’t.
- No hidden allocations. Zig has a hands-off approach when it comes to heap allocation. There is no new keyword or any other language feature that uses a heap allocator. The entire concept of the heap is managed by library and application code, not by the language.
- First-class support for no standard library. Zig has an entirely optional standard library. Each std lib API only gets compiled into your program if you use it. Zig has equal support for either linking against libc or not linking against it. Zig is friendly to bare-metal and high-performance development.
- A Portable Language for Libraries. Zig is attempting to become the new portable language for libraries by simultaneously making it straightforward to conform to the C ABI for external functions, and introducing safety and language design that prevents common bugs within the implementations.
- A Package Manager and Build System for Existing Projects. Not only can you write Zig code instead of C or C++ code, but you can use Zig as a replacement for autotools, cmake, make, scons, ninja, etc. And on top of this, it (will) provide a package manager for native dependencies. This build system is intended to be appropriate even if the entirety of a project’s codebase is in C or C++.
- Simplicity. Zig has no macros and no metaprogramming, yet is still powerful enough to express complex programs in a clear, non-repetitive way. Even Rust has macros with special cases like format!, which is implemented in the compiler itself. Meanwhile in Zig, the equivalent function is implemented in the standard library with no special case code in the compiler.
- Tooling. Zig provides binary archives for Linux, Windows, macOS and FreeBSD. It is installed by downloading and extracting a single archive, no system configuration needed. It is statically compiled, uses LLVM, has out of the box cross-compilation to most major platforms, and ships w/ libc source and dynamically compiles when needed. The Zig build system has caching and compiles C and C++ code with libc support
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Cool article. I can't figure out why i am supposed to care about zig beyond it's fun? I get that it's interesting and more safe than C (honestly though what the hell isn 't). Say you write rust pretty regularly for new product development, what does zig offer to make my life better, my products more stable, etc?
Yes, but say you are not yet writing Rust, perhaps you should choose Zig instead of it?
In all honesty, I prefer the syntax of D over all the others, it feels the most like Java or C# but with a lot of modern benefits. D is trying to do too much though it feels like and I would love for the next D standard library to support OOTB similar to what Go supports, especially a very minimalist web server, I think all modern programming languages should be capable of spinning up web servers out of the box. This is one small detail Go got right in my opinion.
Here's an article from the Chromium team on challenges they faced with trying to integrate Rust (or at least evaluating it) note the entry was last updated in 2020:
https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-security/memory-safet...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the only real way you can run make a language server understand comptime code is using the compiler as a library, similar to how Nim does it - nimsuggest (the tool for autocompletion, definitions, etc) is basically the compiler itself with some nimsuggest-specific stuff, so it understand macros, templates, compile time code evaluation, etc.
Isn't that's how most LSP servers are implemented? I'm only vaguely familiar with clangd.
Cool article. I can't figure out why i am supposed to care about zig beyond it's fun? I get that it's interesting and more safe than C (honestly though what the hell isn 't). Say you write rust pretty regularly for new product development, what does zig offer to make my life better, my products more stable, etc?
The Zig website [0] has an FAQ for this. I’ll copy in an abridged version here for convenience: ========== Why Zig When There is Already C++, D, and Rust? - No hidden control flow. If Zig code doesn’t look like it’s jumping away to call a function, then it isn’t. - No hidden allocations. Zig has a hands-off approach when it comes to heap allocation. There is no new keyword or any other language feature that uses a he…
Cool article. I can't figure out why i am supposed to care about zig beyond it's fun? I get that it's interesting and more safe than C (honestly though what the hell isn 't). Say you write rust pretty regularly for new product development, what does zig offer to make my life better, my products more stable, etc?
- I use zig as my build system for both rust, zig, C libraries and linking since the build system works really well for this purpose
- When I need to write applications or libraries that can benefit from compile-time code, I always try and use zigs since it's much easier to use comptime then a combination of rust macros and generics
- I like the zig async story a lot better. Or at least it's much easier to wrap my head around and write code in compared to rust + tokyo
On the other hand, sometimes I know a project will benefit from the borrow checker or I want to use some of the awesome rust crates that the community made and I'll use rust instead.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, but say you are not yet writing Rust, perhaps you should choose Zig instead of it?
I think you're both asking the same question from different angles. If I understand correctly, and I could be misremembering but Zig is supposed to be compatible with C++ not just C, which is something that is not necessarily straight forward in other C / C++ competing languages. I hear even D has some issues with mangling and what not. In all honesty, I prefer the syntax of D over all the others, it feels the most l…
Cool article. I can't figure out why i am supposed to care about zig beyond it's fun? I get that it's interesting and more safe than C (honestly though what the hell isn 't). Say you write rust pretty regularly for new product development, what does zig offer to make my life better, my products more stable, etc?
Yes, but say you are not yet writing Rust, perhaps you should choose Zig instead of it?
(A bit off topic rant, but Zig documentation is quite bad, it took me a lot more effort that it should to discover the facts above.)
[1] https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/#Anonymous-List-Lit...
[2] https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/#Anonymous-Struct-L...