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Zig is hard but worth it

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Re: Zig is hard but worth it

#41

Post by sigsev_251 »

jsheard wrote: post #7

I get what Zig is going for in making all operations as explicit as possible, but I fear that it's going to turn away fields like graphics and game development where it would be a good fit except for the lack of operator overloading forcing you to go back to C-style math function spaghetti. It's all fun and games until what should be a straightforward math expression turns into 8 nested function calls.

To be fair, there is an operator overloading proposal for C2y/C3a and there is at least one compiler that offers operator overloading as an extension.

Re: Zig is hard but worth it

#42

Post by helen___keller »

distcs wrote: post #36
helen___keller wrote: post #9

My main issue with Zig is that I’m scared to invest time in writing something nontrivial to see the community/adoption flounder then regret not using Rust or C++ later The language itself is fun. The explicit-ness of choosing how allocation is done feels novel, and comptime is a clean solution for problems that are ugly in most languages. Aside from lack of community I’d say the biggest nuisance is error handling in…

> If I use the general purpose allocator then my edge case is PC out of memory What does PC mean in this context?

Personal computer

Re: Zig is hard but worth it

#43

Post by pron »

distcs wrote: post #39
pron wrote: post #4

> there’s not a direct correlation between the slimness of a language’s syntax and ease of learning That's absolutely true, but (the standard library aside) the "syntax" -- or, rather the syntax and core semantics -- of a programming language are arbitrary axiomatic rules, while everything else is derivable from those axioms. So while it is true that a small language can lead to a not-necessarily-easy-to-learn overal…

> Some languages (e.g. lisps) are deceptively small by relying on macros that form a "second-order" language that interacts with the "first-order" language, but Zig doesn't have that. What are some other examples of such languages that rely on second-order languages? You mentioned Lisps. Would Forth be another example? Are there more examples?

C++ templates. Also the rich type-level language in languages like Idris (these are qualitatively different, but I'd say they're another example of a second-language-within-a-language that operates at a different level of objects).

Re: Zig is hard but worth it

#44

Post by distcs »

pjmlp wrote: post #31
bakuninsbart wrote: post #6

Where do you guys see good use cases for Zig? I'm intrigued by the language but don't really have any good ideas on where to try it out. I thought about trying it out in as small data engineering project, but I'm not sure if language support is sufficient for the kind of tooling I would need eg. Database adapters.

In what concerns userspace, I don't see any good case, if I want a better C, without much features, I rather stick to Go even if I dislike some of the design decisions. Or D, Nim, Swift, OCaml, Haskell, AOT C#, AOT Java,... If any kind of automatic memory isn't possible/allowed, I would be reaching out for Rust, not a language that still allows for use-after-free errors. Maybe it is a good language for those that wou…

> If any kind of automatic memory isn't possible/allowed, I would be reaching out for Rust

I have come to the same conclusion but then I also fear that Rust will continue to expand in scope and become a monster language like C++. Do you or anyone fear that? Is that a possibility?

Re: Zig is hard but worth it

#45

Post by rowls66 »

eatonphil wrote: post #18
kuroguro wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose you could write a few line wrapper that panics :) But yeah, most of the time I don't even want to think which allocator to use let alone handle it's errors.

This is basically what I've come to do in the Zig scripts I write at work. It took a bit of getting used to when I joined but we agreed as a team to have all meaningful scripts written in Zig not bash (for one, bash doesn't work on Windows without WSL and we need to support Windows builds/testing/etc.). It makes about as much sense as any other cross-platform scripting option once I got used to it! Some examples: Doc…

I am truly puzzled by this. I understood Zig to be a very low level language like 'C'. Why would you write scripts in it?

Re: Zig is hard but worth it

#46

Post by tylerscott »

thih9 wrote: post #35

> "I learned Zig in a weekend! … Six hours! … 6µs!" say the blissful lizards. I don’t get it; is this a reference? Could someone explain?

IIRC the mascot is a lizard so here the comment is portraying a Zig enthusiast keen on promoting the ease of learning Zig as a lizard. That was my take.

Re: Zig is hard but worth it

#47

Post by ImprobableTruth »

pron wrote: post #4

> there’s not a direct correlation between the slimness of a language’s syntax and ease of learning That's absolutely true, but (the standard library aside) the "syntax" -- or, rather the syntax and core semantics -- of a programming language are arbitrary axiomatic rules, while everything else is derivable from those axioms. So while it is true that a small language can lead to a not-necessarily-easy-to-learn overal…

You still have to memorize the "design patterns" that replace 'missing' features. Especially annoying for something like interfaces where there's a bunch of variants and people often use implementations with awful error reporting reminiscent of C++ templates.

Now, it's definitely neat that you can do reasoning from first principles on it, but I'm not sure how much of a gain that is.

Re: Zig is hard but worth it

#49

Post by eatonphil »

rowls66 wrote: post #45
eatonphil wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is basically what I've come to do in the Zig scripts I write at work. It took a bit of getting used to when I joined but we agreed as a team to have all meaningful scripts written in Zig not bash (for one, bash doesn't work on Windows without WSL and we need to support Windows builds/testing/etc.). It makes about as much sense as any other cross-platform scripting option once I got used to it! Some examples: Doc…

I am truly puzzled by this. I understood Zig to be a very low level language like 'C'. Why would you write scripts in it?

It's significantly nicer to write than C (my opinion obviously). I see it as a general purpose language.

But mostly the team decided to do this because we wanted to unify on one language and double down on the investment in Zig.

I'm not a fanboy (nothing wrong if anyone is, just clarifying about myself); I think this choice was right.

Re: Zig is hard but worth it

#50

Post by mr_00ff00 »

bodge5000 wrote: post #11
jsheard wrote: post #7

I get what Zig is going for in making all operations as explicit as possible, but I fear that it's going to turn away fields like graphics and game development where it would be a good fit except for the lack of operator overloading forcing you to go back to C-style math function spaghetti. It's all fun and games until what should be a straightforward math expression turns into 8 nested function calls.

I'm no expert on zig, but the one area I have seen it shooting up in popularity is game dev. Though I guess that is largely as a replacement for C, so "C-style" wouldnt be much of a concern

Would love to see zig in game dev. I’ve tried some rust and while I love rust in general, I find game dev in it a bit of a mess.
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