Zig's new CLI progress bar explained
andrewkelley.me
Zig's new CLI progress bar explained
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Re: Zig's new CLI progress bar explained
#2I really enjoy reading Zig, I always struggle writing it because its so subtly different from the other languages I use, like C, Rust and Go, that I get confused often.
I really hope Zig becomes stable soon so I can use it on non-throwaway projects
Re: Zig's new CLI progress bar explained
#3Unsolicited writing advice: drop the self-aggrandizing grandiosity. It is distracting and undermines the work itself.
Zig is a language for writing perfect programs? The fact that a progress bar is needed at all is a symptom of the lack of perfection of Zig. A perfect compiler would compile instantly (or at least faster than human perception is capable of registering) with no need for a progress bar.
Re: Zig's new CLI progress bar explained
#4Unsolicited writing advice: drop the self-aggrandizing grandiosity. It is distracting and undermines the work itself. Zig is a language for writing perfect programs? The fact that a progress bar is needed at all is a symptom of the lack of perfection of Zig. A perfect compiler would compile instantly (or at least faster than human perception is capable of registering) with no need for a progress bar.
I highly doubt that was serious. I think you just missed the joke.
Or did I miss something? I really hope I didn’t :(
Re: Zig's new CLI progress bar explained
#5Unsolicited writing advice: drop the self-aggrandizing grandiosity. It is distracting and undermines the work itself. Zig is a language for writing perfect programs? The fact that a progress bar is needed at all is a symptom of the lack of perfection of Zig. A perfect compiler would compile instantly (or at least faster than human perception is capable of registering) with no need for a progress bar.
it's a joke. Obviously, when you're a compiler engineer, creating a progress bar is not a great demonstration of your skill.
Re: Zig's new CLI progress bar explained
#6Unsolicited writing advice: drop the self-aggrandizing grandiosity. It is distracting and undermines the work itself. Zig is a language for writing perfect programs? The fact that a progress bar is needed at all is a symptom of the lack of perfection of Zig. A perfect compiler would compile instantly (or at least faster than human perception is capable of registering) with no need for a progress bar.
I think it’s fun and enjoy reading it.
Re: Zig's new CLI progress bar explained
#7Unsolicited writing advice: drop the self-aggrandizing grandiosity. It is distracting and undermines the work itself. Zig is a language for writing perfect programs? The fact that a progress bar is needed at all is a symptom of the lack of perfection of Zig. A perfect compiler would compile instantly (or at least faster than human perception is capable of registering) with no need for a progress bar.
"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."
Re: Zig's new CLI progress bar explained
#8Unsolicited writing advice: drop the self-aggrandizing grandiosity. It is distracting and undermines the work itself. Zig is a language for writing perfect programs? The fact that a progress bar is needed at all is a symptom of the lack of perfection of Zig. A perfect compiler would compile instantly (or at least faster than human perception is capable of registering) with no need for a progress bar.
I highly doubt that was serious. I think you just missed the joke. Or did I miss something? I really hope I didn’t :(
It's amusing to me that multiple people on HN think I'm joking. Have you ever tried to write thread-safe, lock-free, infallible, non-heap-allocating code before?
I'm curious what kind of API the people who think this problem is easy would have come up with, and what its performance characteristics would be compared to mine.
I had a blast working on this problem!
Re: Zig's new CLI progress bar explained
#9The visualisation is really neat.
Would be interesting to have a mechanism to track runtime of each step and compare across runs (maybe with a unique generated key?), so that you could benchmark speed up and slow down. This would enable per time rather than per step progress bars.
Re: Zig's new CLI progress bar explained
#10I really enjoy reading Zig, I always struggle writing it because its so subtly different from the other languages I use, like C, Rust and Go, that I get confused often. I really hope Zig becomes stable soon so I can use it on non-throwaway projects
My experience is exactly the same. It deviates just enough in really minor ways that it becomes difficult to write. There's a lot of upfront effort to unlearn all the syntactic patterns that have already been established, the fact that the differences are really small makes it harder, not easier.
I think the language design includes a lot of good justification for these choices, but I worry they might have underestimated the sheer power of habit and historical precedence.