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Zig and Rust

matklad.github.io

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Re: Zig and Rust

#151

Post by kaba0 »

Yoric wrote: post #56
netbioserror wrote: post #20

Still not convinced that memory semantics are critical in the vast majority of domains. Incredibly fast speeds can be achieved with simple GC and RC for short-running programs, and programs with sustained runtimes can rely on generational GC. These methods have the advantage of nearly eliminating the need for memory semantics, leaving only business logic behind. The best example might be Nim, which drastically reduce…

Frankly, my reason for using Rust is not memory semantics (I'd be happy for most applications with a Gc), it's the type system. I could be writing in Haskell for an even more powerful type system, of course, (especially now that Haskell has gained linear types) but the language never took hold outside of academia.

Well, “never took hold” is relatively. It is and will likely always be a niche language, but one with a quite big audience and ecosystem. There are people happily using different languages that are much smaller, they just happen to occupy a less academic niche — e.g. I’m guessing but you probably don’t have such feelings against D, when it might very well be smaller than Haskell.

Re: Zig and Rust

#152

Post by kaba0 »

netbioserror wrote: post #98
klyrs wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Still not convinced that memory semantics are critical in the vast majority of domains. This is okay. Zig is not targeting the vast majority of domains. It targets the low-level, performance-critical domain that C occupies. It would be a great language to write a compiler/interpreter for a higher-level language that has the bells and whistles that you want.

It's still bizarre though that Rust is capturing such ridiculous mindshare. I suspect it has a lot to do with web developers being plugged into Mozilla, and Mozilla spending quite a lot on Rust development and marketing. And Zig may be being roped into it. It seems to be a temporary low-level programming zeitgeist driven by YouTube and Reddit recommendation algorithms to an audience that has never done it and probabl…

Rust is the first low-level language that actually solves a fundamental problem of low-level programming. I don’t see why is it surprising that it gains weight.

Zig, while I appreciate many of its design goals and definitely has some novel ideas, is “just” a better C.

Re: Zig and Rust

#153

Post by kaba0 »

c-cube wrote: post #136
pron wrote: post #90

> we don’t have a reliability-oriented high-level programming language with a good quality of implementation (modern ML, if you will) Java is fairly popular, I hear.

Calling Java a modern ML is a bit of a stretch :-). It's getting sum types, I hear, but it still has null, and it's not really the feeling of a nice expression oriented Hindley-Milner language. If anything scala 3 might be a closer candidate.

It already has sum types. Pattern matching on them is not yet finalized, but the ADTs itself is.

Re: Zig and Rust

#154

Post by avgcorrection »

childintime wrote: post #100
nindalf wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t need to pull in dependencies if you don’t want to. But if you do, the contracts on ownership enforced by the compiler allows the software to compose better.

You're a Rust zealot? The point still stands: for lots of projects 95% of the code pulled in is not actually used, but is still cause for breakage. Of the worst kind, because it has nothing to do with the problem being solved. Sorry, but the build system just gave up, for no good reason at all. Only total perfection is acceptable to Rust, and that is also it's Achilles heel, well exemplified by this case. Now Rust co…

# First rule of zealotry

Whoever is first to throw out the zealot accusation is himself/herself the zealot.

Re: Zig and Rust

#155

Post by kaba0 »

_0w8t wrote: post #137
kaba0 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There simply is no silver bullet for memory management, you can either have high performance or automatic memory management That’s only true for workloads where you can optimize the memory layout/allocations. This may not be true in general, where you will end up implementing a shitty GC that will definitely perform worse than a properly written one. Also, the cost of a proper GC is heavily overblown in my opinion.…

GC is not a solved problem and can be costly. We clearly see in a production server written in Go spikes in latency and memory usage. So most likely for the next server-type application we will use Rust. Then there are benchmarks where Nginx is faster than Caddy by factor of 3.

Go doesn’t really have a good GC for what it’s worth. And of course there will always be domains where the tradeoffs of a GC doesn’t worth it, but those are very very rare.

Re: Zig and Rust

#156

Post by legerdemain »

Not a particularly deep comment, but... matklad (the author) created, essentially, the entirety of the modern Rust developer experience. He is the original author and biggest contributor to both rust-analyzer and Intellij Rust. If someone this central to the Rust world has switched to writing Zig full time, and not for boring, pragmatic reasons either, a little seed of doubt about the long-term stability of Rust as a professional community begins to grow in my heart.

Re: Zig and Rust

#157

Post by nindalf »

avgcorrection wrote: post #154
childintime wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're a Rust zealot? The point still stands: for lots of projects 95% of the code pulled in is not actually used, but is still cause for breakage. Of the worst kind, because it has nothing to do with the problem being solved. Sorry, but the build system just gave up, for no good reason at all. Only total perfection is acceptable to Rust, and that is also it's Achilles heel, well exemplified by this case. Now Rust co…

# First rule of zealotry Whoever is first to throw out the zealot accusation is himself/herself the zealot.

Really weird that my innocuous comment would prompt such a visceral response. Not cool.

Re: Zig and Rust

#158

Post by ben0x539 »

Yoric wrote: post #56
netbioserror wrote: post #20

Still not convinced that memory semantics are critical in the vast majority of domains. Incredibly fast speeds can be achieved with simple GC and RC for short-running programs, and programs with sustained runtimes can rely on generational GC. These methods have the advantage of nearly eliminating the need for memory semantics, leaving only business logic behind. The best example might be Nim, which drastically reduce…

Frankly, my reason for using Rust is not memory semantics (I'd be happy for most applications with a Gc), it's the type system. I could be writing in Haskell for an even more powerful type system, of course, (especially now that Haskell has gained linear types) but the language never took hold outside of academia.

I know this is facile, and it's speaking as someone with a lot more enthusiasm about than expertise with Haskell, but whenever I write some toy Haskell code and have to think about "remember to close this file handle before the end of this block" or "make sure not to use this file handle outside this block (because we just used a combinator to close it)", I'm baffled that Rust has mostly figured out that whole class of problem before Haskell

Re: Zig and Rust

#159

Post by lr1970 »

nindalf wrote: post #13

This title is almost perfectly designed to do well on HN, but it's definitely worth reading in it's entirety. Some highlights for me: - The author sees Rust and Zig in different niches. When Rust was created it didn't need to specialise because there were no languages like Rust. It was free to be a general purpose language targeting multiple domains. But that's not the case for Zig. He sees Zig shining at writing sys…

> - The author was the original author of rust-analyzer, the LSP for Rust

Not only this. matklad is also original author of IntelliJ Rust - another popular IDE.

Re: Zig and Rust

#160

Post by netbioserror »

kaba0 wrote: post #152
netbioserror wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still bizarre though that Rust is capturing such ridiculous mindshare. I suspect it has a lot to do with web developers being plugged into Mozilla, and Mozilla spending quite a lot on Rust development and marketing. And Zig may be being roped into it. It seems to be a temporary low-level programming zeitgeist driven by YouTube and Reddit recommendation algorithms to an audience that has never done it and probabl…

Rust is the first low-level language that actually solves a fundamental problem of low-level programming. I don’t see why is it surprising that it gains weight. Zig, while I appreciate many of its design goals and definitely has some novel ideas, is “just” a better C.

I think your comment can actually help me clarify what I meant. My perception is that there is a rift between what domains Rust is targeting versus what audience is actually hyped about Rust.

When I look to the C++ world and the embedded/realtime systems industry, what I see is lots of discussion about Carbon and herb Sutter's CppFront. I don't see as much Rust discussion.

When I look to the JavaScript/webdev/fullstack world, that is who I see discussing Rust; these are domains where GC languages, even those with lots of GC churn like Clojure, have already proven their utility. In the creator sphere, the same folks talking about JS frameworks are the ones covering Rust and, to a lesser extent, Zig.

As usual, the C world seems completely disinterested towards what is outside of it.

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