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How I Built Zig-SQLite

rischmann.fr

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Re: How I Built Zig-SQLite

#21

Post by noodledoodletwo »

winter_squirrel wrote: post #16
noodledoodletwo wrote: post #10

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?

As someone who uses both for different personal projects: - 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 stor…

Does a really short summary of this read kind of like, "zig is a modern c, but I like using rust as a modern c++"?

Agree, Tokio is a little tricky for people new to rust no doubt, but it's tricky for a reason. It's saving lives in production.

Re: How I Built Zig-SQLite

#22

Post by Sphax »

curist wrote: post #19

By using comptime, the statement couldn't be runtime composed, right? That's currently the major holdback for me to spend more time on zig: if using comptime become more common in zig community, the libs could be less flexible to use. It feels sort of like function coloring to me, that the whole call chain also need to pass down the value as comptime variable. I've only spend 2 days with zig, so I would love to learn…

Only the metadata of the statement is comptime, that is the type annotation for each bind parameters. So if you have this query

    SELECT * FROM user WHERE age = $age{u16}
You _must_ provide a u16 bind parameter. However the value itself is of course not required to be comptime-known, that would make the whole thing unusable.

For what it's worth there are in zig-sqlite variants of the method which bypass the comptime checks; they're not documented properly yet but see all methods named `xyzDynamic`, for example https://github.com/vrischmann/zig-sqlite/blob/master/sqlite....

Re: How I Built Zig-SQLite

#23

Post by noodledoodletwo »

noodledoodletwo wrote: post #15
pbronez wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yea I feel like most of these differentiators aren't things most people care about barring one. Tight integrations with c/c++ is potentially useful, beyond that I don't really get it. It's kind of like Hare in that regard?

See I got downvoted a bit... Let me rephrase, other modern languages offer something along the lines of these, of the things that aren't there for say rust, close integration with c/c++ is nice. Ie rust has nostd, etc.

Re: How I Built Zig-SQLite

#24

Post by DixieDev »

noodledoodletwo wrote: post #10

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?

Most likely you specifically don't have much reason to care about Zig. Meanwhile, C can still often be found in areas where high performance and precise control over memory are important - such as in small embedded systems and game engine development - and Zig is a great fit as a replacement.

While you can technically use Rust in these domains you'll find yourself jumping through hoops and fighting against quirks that come with it being fairly high-level and very opinionated on how to enforce memory safety.

One such scenario I've encountered is implementing my own memcpy with a loop like `for i in 0..len`. This works in release builds, but without optimisations this gets a deeeeep callstack that eventually also calls memcpy, so you get a stack overflow. Note how memcpy is implemented in rlibc to avoid this issue: https://docs.rs/rlibc/latest/src/rlibc/lib.rs.html#30-38

Re: How I Built Zig-SQLite

#25

Post by noodledoodletwo »

DixieDev wrote: post #24
noodledoodletwo wrote: post #10

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?

Most likely you specifically don't have much reason to care about Zig. Meanwhile, C can still often be found in areas where high performance and precise control over memory are important - such as in small embedded systems and game engine development - and Zig is a great fit as a replacement. While you can technically use Rust in these domains you'll find yourself jumping through hoops and fighting against quirks tha…

Fair enough thanks for explaining. Basically if you want to make your own Malloc or things like it, zig is friendlier. Will say though, I've used rust for gamedev, and found the experience to be really nice. Was I writing my own memcpy though, nope.

It's funny how in rust you can write raw asm, but there seem to be quirks somewhere in the middle.

Re: How I Built Zig-SQLite

#26

Post by [deleted] »

noodledoodletwo wrote: post #10

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?

[deleted]

Re: How I Built Zig-SQLite

#27

Post by [deleted] »

[deleted] wrote: post #26
noodledoodletwo wrote: post #10

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?

[deleted]

[deleted]

Re: How I Built Zig-SQLite

#28

Post by nickysielicki »

constexpr/consteval/comptime/etc is a game changer for the systems programmer and it feels so close but yet so far. Can someone speak to what language has the best support for this? Some things that I feel are missing in C++:

* arbitrary file I/O. I can take my compile time data and write a python script to put it in a std::array, but I shouldn’t have to.

* non-fixed-sized containers, ie vector

* a generic memoization utility in the standard library for caching. If I want my function to handle any input at runtime, but I want to pre-populate a cache at compile time for values that I know will be called, it’s doable but not as easy as it should be. (In general, given the amount of algorithms that rely on memoization, I’m somewhat surprised that Python is the only language I know that makes memoization as easy as a decorator).

Re: How I Built Zig-SQLite

#29

Post by soggybutter »

noodledoodletwo wrote: post #21
winter_squirrel wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who uses both for different personal projects: - 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 stor…

Does a really short summary of this read kind of like, "zig is a modern c, but I like using rust as a modern c++"? Agree, Tokio is a little tricky for people new to rust no doubt, but it's tricky for a reason. It's saving lives in production.

This is actually the frame of reference I've taken to giving most folks. Zig is to C what Rust is to C++ in my mind. Is there a lot of overlap between all 4? Absolutely. But devs still choose C over C++ (and Rust) in some cases, and I think it'll be similar for Zig

Re: How I Built Zig-SQLite

#30

Post by formerly_proven »

nickysielicki wrote: post #28

constexpr/consteval/comptime/etc is a game changer for the systems programmer and it feels so close but yet so far. Can someone speak to what language has the best support for this? Some things that I feel are missing in C++: * arbitrary file I/O. I can take my compile time data and write a python script to put it in a std::array, but I shouldn’t have to. * non-fixed-sized containers, ie vector * a generic memoizatio…

> * arbitrary file I/O. I can take my compile time data and write a python script to put it in a std::array, but I shouldn’t have to.

https://ziglang.org/documentation/0.9.1/#embedFile

I haven't tried, but because it should just be equivalent to a string literal you should be able to further process it using comptime as well.

> * non-fixed-sized containers, ie vector

One way is to just have a function count how many entries you need and use arrays. This is all pretty straightforward because comptime.

Real dynamic comptime containers are dependent on making a comptime allocator available. There's a ticket for that: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/1291

> * a generic memoization utility in the standard library for caching. If I want my function to handle any input at runtime, but I want to pre-populate a cache at compile time for values that I know will be called, it’s doable but not as easy as it should be. (In general, given the amount of algorithms that rely on memoization, I’m somewhat surprised that Python is the only language I know that makes memoization as easy as a decorator).

I don't think it's possible to use comptime to generate wrapper functions duplicating the signature of a given function, at least I haven't found a way to do so. The function signature has to be spelled out in the comptime code.

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