Problems of C, and how Zig addresses them

I'm no expert on either languages, but I tried Zig for the first time properly the other day. I really liked it up until I hit hashmaps. One thing that I think goes under-appreciated about C (and other languages with a similar paradigm) is thats its pretty upfront and clear about what it can and can't do out of the box. If you want hashmaps in C, you need to create your own implementation, otherwise think of a way round them. In Zig meanwhile, they exist in the standard library, but at least for me, were more work than they were worth to work with. The result was the same, when making my test project in both C and Zig I ended up not using hashmaps, the difference is that in C I came to this decision in 2 minutes rather than 2 hours.

I imagine if I had more experience in Zig, none of that would be a problem, and its not aiming to be a beginner-friendly language anyway, but that was just my experience of it so far

Re: Problems of C, and how Zig addresses them

#8

Post by hazebooth » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 3:31 PM UTC

bodge5000 wrote: post #7

I'm no expert on either languages, but I tried Zig for the first time properly the other day. I really liked it up until I hit hashmaps. One thing that I think goes under-appreciated about C (and other languages with a similar paradigm) is thats its pretty upfront and clear about what it can and can't do out of the box. If you want hashmaps in C, you need to create your own implementation, otherwise think of a way ro…

Would you mind elaborating on the complications you ran into? I ask because I think you used std.HashMap instead of std.AutoHashMap, the latter of which automatically chooses a hash function based on the types provided.

Re: Problems of C, and how Zig addresses them

#9

Post by Lyngbakr » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 3:34 PM UTC

That was a nice, clear explanation that even I could understand. One thing I wasn't sure about, though.

  var arr = [_]u32{ 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 }; // 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
  const slice1 = arr[1..5];             //    2, 3, 4, 5
  const slice2 = slice1[1..3];

If I were to use indices out of range, presumably that would that give me a compile time error? Could I use variables as the indices and, if so, could I get a seg fault at runtime or are there some sort of guards on there?

Re: Problems of C, and how Zig addresses them

#10

Post by jeltz » Mon, Jul 03, 2023, 3:34 PM UTC

bodge5000 wrote: post #7

I'm no expert on either languages, but I tried Zig for the first time properly the other day. I really liked it up until I hit hashmaps. One thing that I think goes under-appreciated about C (and other languages with a similar paradigm) is thats its pretty upfront and clear about what it can and can't do out of the box. If you want hashmaps in C, you need to create your own implementation, otherwise think of a way ro…

I can't remember having any issues with using hash maps in Zig when I tried it out during Advent of Code. They were almost as easy to use in Zig as in Rust. Only extra complication was returning error on failed allocation rather than panicking.