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What if the person you're replying to really, really likes Zig except for this one aspect of it?
Then they shouldn't get so mad at something that's merely annoying; it's bad for the heart and circulatory system.
It just occurred to me, Zig could be a great learning-language for CS When I was in college we mostly used C++, which exposed (and thereby taught) a lot of core concepts around how computers and low-level languages work. But it was also a bit of a nightmare for... unrelated, obvious reasons. Rust is great for building software, but as a learning language I think it introduces too many additional concepts, has too man…
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> Moreover, we shouldn't assume that Zig pointers are the only feature that breaks spatial memory safety. It was simply the first one I found after like 2 minutes of looking through the docs. After like 5 more minutes I found another: extern unions. Just now I found another: sentinel-terminated pointers, since you could delete the sentinel. You're right on each of those points. But (AFAIK) all those types are explici…
I do think the 'unsafe' notation is the crucial bit here. Rust has stuff that is heavily (although not completely) motivated by C interop. For example, 'union' in Rust is something that is rarely used outside of C interop. (With some notable exceptions in the standard library.) But, crucially, in order to actually use a Rust 'union', you do have to utter the 'unsafe' notation. I'm not sure I have an opinion as strong…
Imagine if you could run a tool on a codebase, and it statically found all the unsafe locations, and in idiomatic code there were very few of those, and you could reason about them. That would be equivalent to writing "unsafe" in the code, except you need to run the tool to "see" the annotations. That would be as good as annotations - it could prevent the same number of bugs. (Though I guess an argument could be, maybe some people forget to run the tool; fair enough.)
No such tool can exist for C or C++. But such a tool could exist for a new language like Zig and Carbon, if they design themselves in certain ways, at least for spatial memory safety. Concretely, unsafe things like raw pointers in Zig have different types than safe slices, so a tool can actually find them; and unsafe things are (AFAIK) not idiomatic either, so they'd be rare.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What if the person you're replying to really, really likes Zig except for this one aspect of it?
Then they shouldn't get so mad at something that's merely annoying; it's bad for the heart and circulatory system.
I tried Zig recently but I found the unsilenceable lints to be a huge productivity killer. I actually posted a link to the GitHub issue this morning. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32751317 This makes a normal workflow with `watchexec zig test` basically impossible, since before I can even run the tests I have to spend time hunting down which variables are used/unused at the moment and (un)commenting them. And…
> I do understand the reasoning (they don't want people committing poor quality code) Not that this lint actually achieves that, or even prevents real errors. Go has the same, and it's so simplistic as to only be annoying. For instance not sure whether this fails in Zig but Go will allow this: v1, err := Foo() if err != nil { return nil, err } v2, err := Bar(v1) return v2, nil Error of second call is never checked, b…
Why would anyone use a new systems programming language that is not safe? Zig might be better than C in some aspects, but is it worth it to switch to Zig when you realize that it's not much safer than C? [0] [0]: https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/how-safe-is-zig/
Also, safety is not the only consideration when writing software right? Otherwise, all software would have to be written using formal methods [2] ... clearly overkill for many (most?) applications.
Maybe it is a bit obvious, but I think someone would pick Zig because they like the set of features that the language provides, allowing this person to write reasonably bug free code in (hopefully) shorter time than using a different language or methodology.
I think most ppl choose the language because they like the tools/ecosystem/libs available, because it aligns with previous experience/s, because of how popular it is for the kind of app they are writing, and because they agree with the authors philosophy (as opposed to choosing it based on any particular language features).
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We've had -Werror forever, the consensus is it's a bad idea. In addition to everything else, you can't ever change the warnings, including fixing bugs in them, without potentially breaking code.
> We've had -Werror forever, the consensus is it's a bad idea. Says who? Package repo maintainers? -Werror is actually quite divisive.
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You and me both, in fact I made my voice heard in the Github issue. What's damning is how much Stockholm Syndrome there is around this feature, with people saying it's no big deal and it helps catch bugs. It's more annoying than helpful, and it catches a very small amount of corner cases, while completely killing productivity. And you know what's the reasoning behind this? "Zig doesn't have warnings." As if it's a ma…
So don't use Zig? I don't get why you're so angry about something someone else likes. Just don't use it or look at it! So easy...
I tried Zig recently but I found the unsilenceable lints to be a huge productivity killer. I actually posted a link to the GitHub issue this morning. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32751317 This makes a normal workflow with `watchexec zig test` basically impossible, since before I can even run the tests I have to spend time hunting down which variables are used/unused at the moment and (un)commenting them. And…
I had to work in python for a long time where code tends to be incredibly relaxed. When I switched to strict mypy typechecking at every build I became much much more productive and found and fixed dozens of bugs way earlier in development. I now am worried about all warnings and always strive to fix them.
I am also making an analogy to "not being allowed to smoke indoors" when I see these complaints. People hated those laws when they were first proposed but everyone's cool with having to do a tiny bit work for health and safety.
We'll see how communities play out, but I'm all for being rigorous.