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Zig feels more practical than Rust for real-world CLI tools

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Re: Zig feels more practical than Rust for real-world CLI tools

#31

Post by naikrovek »

KingOfCoders wrote: post #5

"All it took was some basic understanding of memory management and a bit of discipline." The words of every C programmer who created a CVE.

are you saying that such understanding isn't enough or that every C programmer who said that didn't understand those things?

C and Zig aren't the same. I would wager that syntax differences between languages can help you see things in one language that are much harder to see in another. I'm not saying that Zig or C are good or bad for this, or that one is better than the other in terms of the ease of seeing memory problems with your eyes, I'm just saying that I would bet that there's some syntax that could be employed which make memory usage much more clear to the developer, instead of requiring that the developer keep track of these things in their mind.

Even if you must manually annotate each function so that some metaprogram that runs at compile time can check that nothing is out of place could help detect memory leaks, I would think. or something; that's just an idea. There's a whole metaprogramming world of possibilities here that Zig allows that C simply doesn't. I think there's a lot of room for tooling like this to detect problems without forcing you to contort yourself into strange shapes simply to make the compiler happy.

Re: Zig feels more practical than Rust for real-world CLI tools

#32

Post by zwnow »

r_lee wrote: post #29
zwnow wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Actually memory management is easy, you just have to...." - Every C programmer I've talked to No its not, if it was that easy C wouldn't have this many memory related issues...

It may be easy to do memory management, but it's not too easy to detect if you've made a fatal mistake when such mistakes won't cause apparent defects avoiding all memory management mistakes is not easy, and the bigger the codebase becomes, the more exponential the chance for disaster gets

Absolutely, big factor is undefined behavior which makes it look like everything works. Until it doesn't. I quit C long ago because I don't want to deal with manual memory management in any language. I was overwhelmed by Zigs approach as well. Rust is pretty much the only language making it bearable to me.

Re: Zig feels more practical than Rust for real-world CLI tools

#33

Post by Galanwe »

simonask wrote: post #21

The benefit of Zig seems to be that it allows you to keep thinking like a C programmer. That may be great, but to a certain extent it’s also just a question of habit. Seasoned Rust coders don’t spend time fighting the borrow checker - their code is already written in a way that just works. Once you’ve been using Rust for a while, you don’t have to “restructure” your code to please the borrow checker, because you’ve a…

> Seasoned Rust coders don’t spend time fighting the borrow checker

My experience is that what makes your statement true, is that _seasoned_ Rust developers just sprinkle `Arc` all over the place, thus effectively switching to automatic garbage collection. Because 1) statically checked memory management is too restrictive for most kinds of non trivial data structures, and 2) the hoops of lifetimes you have to go to to please the static checker whenever you start doing anything non trivial are just above human comprehension level.

Re: Zig feels more practical than Rust for real-world CLI tools

#36

Post by karmakaze »

I was going to say that it's greatly understating the value of the borrow checker. It guarantees no invalid memory accesses. But then it added:

> This means that basically the borrow checker can only catch issues at comptime but it will not fix the underlying issue that is developers misunderstanding memory lifetimes or overcomplicated ownership. The compiler can only enforce the rules you’re trying to follow; it can’t teach you good patterns, and it won’t save you from bad design choices.

In the short times that I wrote Rust, it never occurred to me that my lifetime annotations were incorrect. They felt like a bit of a chore but I thought said what I meant. I'm sure there's a lot of getting used to using it--like static types--and becomes second nature at some point. Regardless, code that doesn't use unsafe can't have two threads concurrently writing the same memory.

The full title is "Why Zig Feels More Practical Than Rust for Real-World CLI Tools". I don't see why CLI tools are special in any respect. The article does make some good points, but it doesn't invalidate the strength of Rust in preventing CVEs IMO. Rust or Zig may feel certain ways to use for certain people, time and data will tell.

Personally, there isn't much I do that needs the full speed of C/C++, Zig, Rust so there's plenty of GC languages. And when I do contribute to other projects, I don't get to choose the language and would be happy to use Rust, Zig, or C/C++.

Re: Zig feels more practical than Rust for real-world CLI tools

#37

Post by Yiin »

tonetegeatinst wrote: post #19
ranger_danger wrote: post #8

IMO, as a C++ developer, Swift makes the most sense to me if I were looking for a safer alternative. I think people prefer what's familiar to them, and Swift definitely looks closer to existing C++ to me, and I believe has multiple people from the C++ WG working on it now as well, supposedly after getting fed up with the lack of language progress on C++. The most recent versions gained a lot in the way of cross-platf…

Can you share some swift resources so I can look into the features of swift compared to zig and C?

that sounds like a query for llm

Re: Zig feels more practical than Rust for real-world CLI tools

#38

Post by nicoburns »

simonask wrote: post #21

The benefit of Zig seems to be that it allows you to keep thinking like a C programmer. That may be great, but to a certain extent it’s also just a question of habit. Seasoned Rust coders don’t spend time fighting the borrow checker - their code is already written in a way that just works. Once you’ve been using Rust for a while, you don’t have to “restructure” your code to please the borrow checker, because you’ve a…

100% I came to Rust from a primarily JavaScript/TypeScript background, and most of the idioms and approaches I was used to using translated directly into Rust.

Re: Zig feels more practical than Rust for real-world CLI tools

#39

Post by amw-zero »

Galanwe wrote: post #33
simonask wrote: post #21

The benefit of Zig seems to be that it allows you to keep thinking like a C programmer. That may be great, but to a certain extent it’s also just a question of habit. Seasoned Rust coders don’t spend time fighting the borrow checker - their code is already written in a way that just works. Once you’ve been using Rust for a while, you don’t have to “restructure” your code to please the borrow checker, because you’ve a…

> Seasoned Rust coders don’t spend time fighting the borrow checker My experience is that what makes your statement true, is that _seasoned_ Rust developers just sprinkle `Arc` all over the place, thus effectively switching to automatic garbage collection. Because 1) statically checked memory management is too restrictive for most kinds of non trivial data structures, and 2) the hoops of lifetimes you have to go to t…

How often are you writing non-trivial data structures?

Re: Zig feels more practical than Rust for real-world CLI tools

#40

Post by antoineMoPa »

I also loved Zig when manually typing code, but I increasingly use AI to write my code even in personal projects. In that context, I'd rather use Rust more, since the AI takes care of complex syntax anyway. Also, the rust ecosystem is bigger, so I'd rather stick to this community.

> Developers are not Idiots

I'm often distracted and AIs are idiots, so a stricter language can keep both me and AIs from doing extra dumb stuff.

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