The quote in Spanish about a Norse god is from a story by Jorge Luis Borges, here's an English translation: https://biblioklept.org/2019/04/02/the-disk-a-very-short-sto...
Things Zig comptime won't do
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Re: Things Zig comptime won't do
#12> Zig’s comptime feature is most famous for what it can do: generics!, conditional compilation!, subtyping!, serialization!, ORM! That’s fascinating, but, to be fair, there’s a bunch of languages with quite powerful compile time evaluation capabilities that can do equivalent things. I'm curious what are these other languages that can do these things? I read HN regularly but don't recall them. Or maybe that's includin…
Rust, D, Nim, Crystal, Julia
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Re: Things Zig comptime won't do
#13I like the Zig language and tooling. I do wish there was a safety mode that give the same guarantees as Rust, but it’s a huge step above C/C++. I am also extremely impressed with the Zig compiler. Perhaps the safety is the tradeoff with the comparative ease of using the language compared to Rust, but I’d love the best of both worlds if it were possible
I like Zig as a replacement for C, but not C++ due to its lack of RAII. Rust on the other hand is a great replacement for C++. I see Zig as filling a small niche where allocation failures are paramount - very constrained embedded devices, etc... Otherwise, I think you just get a lot more with Rust.
Re: Things Zig comptime won't do
#14I like the Zig language and tooling. I do wish there was a safety mode that give the same guarantees as Rust, but it’s a huge step above C/C++. I am also extremely impressed with the Zig compiler. Perhaps the safety is the tradeoff with the comparative ease of using the language compared to Rust, but I’d love the best of both worlds if it were possible
I wish for “strict” mode as well. My current thinking: TypeScript is to JavaScript as Zig is to C I am a huge TS fan.
Is Zig aiming to extend C or extinguish it? The embrace story is well-established at this point but the remainder is often unclear in the messaging from the community.
Re: Things Zig comptime won't do
#15I like the Zig language and tooling. I do wish there was a safety mode that give the same guarantees as Rust, but it’s a huge step above C/C++. I am also extremely impressed with the Zig compiler. Perhaps the safety is the tradeoff with the comparative ease of using the language compared to Rust, but I’d love the best of both worlds if it were possible
I like Zig as a replacement for C, but not C++ due to its lack of RAII. Rust on the other hand is a great replacement for C++. I see Zig as filling a small niche where allocation failures are paramount - very constrained embedded devices, etc... Otherwise, I think you just get a lot more with Rust.
Even better than RAII would be linear types, but it would require a borrow checker to track the lifetimes of objects. Then you would get a compiler error if you forget to call a .destroy() method
Re: Things Zig comptime won't do
#16This is a very educational blog post. I knew ‘comptime for’ and ‘inline for’ were comptime related, but didn’t know the difference. The post explains the inline version only knows the length at comptime. I guess it’s for loop unrolling.
Re: Things Zig comptime won't do
#17I like the Zig language and tooling. I do wish there was a safety mode that give the same guarantees as Rust, but it’s a huge step above C/C++. I am also extremely impressed with the Zig compiler. Perhaps the safety is the tradeoff with the comparative ease of using the language compared to Rust, but I’d love the best of both worlds if it were possible
>but I’d love the best of both worlds if it were possible
I am just going to quote what pcwalton said the other day that perhaps answer your question.
>> I’d be much more excited about that promise [memory safety in Rust] if the compiler provided that safety, rather than asking the programmer to do an extraordinary amount of extra work to conform to syntactically enforced safety rules. Put the complexity in the compiler, dudes.
> That exists; it's called garbage collection.
>If you don't want the performance characteristics of garbage collection, something has to give. Either you sacrifice memory safety or you accept a more restrictive paradigm than GC'd languages give you. For some reason, programming language enthusiasts think that if you think really hard, every issue has some solution out there without any drawbacks at all just waiting to be found. But in fact, creating a system that has zero runtime overhead and unlimited aliasing with a mutable heap is as impossible as finding two even numbers whose sum is odd.
Re: Things Zig comptime won't do
#18Yes!
To me, the uniqueness of Zig's comptime is a combination of two things:
1. comtpime replaces many other features that would be specialised in other languages with or without rich compile-time (or runtime) metaprogramming, and
2. comptime is referentially transparent [1], that makes it strictly "weaker" than AST macros, but simpler to understand; what's surprising is just how capable you can be with a comptime mechanism with access to introspection yet without the referentially opaque power of macros.
These two give Zig a unique combination of simplicity and power. We're used to seeing things like that in Scheme and other Lisps, but the approach in Zig is very different. The outcome isn't as general as in Lisp, but it's powerful enough while keeping code easier to understand.
You can like it or not, but it is very interesting and very novel (the novelty isn't in the feature itself, but in the place it has in the language). Languages with a novel design and approach that you can learn in a couple of days are quite rare.
[1]: In short, this means that you get no access to names or expressions, only the values they yield.
Re: Things Zig comptime won't do
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wish for “strict” mode as well. My current thinking: TypeScript is to JavaScript as Zig is to C I am a huge TS fan.
Is Zig aiming to extend C or extinguish it? The embrace story is well-established at this point but the remainder is often unclear in the messaging from the community.
Zig is open source, so the analogy to Microsoft's EEE [0] seems misplaced.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extingu...
Re: Things Zig comptime won't do
#20I like the Zig language and tooling. I do wish there was a safety mode that give the same guarantees as Rust, but it’s a huge step above C/C++. I am also extremely impressed with the Zig compiler. Perhaps the safety is the tradeoff with the comparative ease of using the language compared to Rust, but I’d love the best of both worlds if it were possible
>but I’d love the best of both worlds if it were possible I am just going to quote what pcwalton said the other day that perhaps answer your question. >> I’d be much more excited about that promise [memory safety in Rust] if the compiler provided that safety, rather than asking the programmer to do an extraordinary amount of extra work to conform to syntactically enforced safety rules. Put the complexity in the compi…
Yes, but I’m not hoping for that. I’m hoping for something like a scripting language with simpler lifetime annotations. Is Rust going to be the last popular language to be invented that explores that space? I hope not.