> We run a fuzzing fleet of 1,000 dedicated CPU cores 24/7. that a lot
The principle of crashing on application violation makes it worth it I’d guess
TigerBeetle and Synadia pledge $512k to the Zig Software Foundation
121–130 of 213 posts
Re: TigerBeetle and Synadia pledge $512k to the Zig Software Foundation
#122Yeah, that is a lot more insightful than Synadia's marketing spew, thanks. The BDFL point is particularly interesting to me having followed C++ for almost two decades and having been disenfranchised by the inconsistency of the design. I am more of the belief now that a BDFL is the right model for programming language design, particularly one that isn't insular and listens to feedback, but upholds their vision for the…
(this was originally a reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45703746 before we merged the threads)
Re: TigerBeetle and Synadia pledge $512k to the Zig Software Foundation
#123In performing an assessment of which ecosystem and PL to use to develop our high-integrity automation software for mission-critical applications, we assessed Rust, Zig, and Ada/SPARK. Rust had the support behind it from a big corp., a passionate developer community, and some adoption by significant entities, but none with cyber-physical systems. And it has been interesting to see some developers leaving Rust for Zig…
>leaving Rust for Zig for the sheer enjoyment of using it instead. What do people find more enjoyable?
Not having to care for the fucking borrow checker. And far fewer concepts. And faster compiles.
Re: TigerBeetle and Synadia pledge $512k to the Zig Software Foundation
#124I'm absolutely struggling to understand what Synadia even does. it's been an infuriating experience navigating through their marketing site. It's been minutes and I still don't understand what it is. What is NATS? Edit: I had to google what NATS.IO is. The marketing site is infuriatingly useless. Please, can we stop doing this? Edit: At the bottom on the footer it says compare NATS to Kafka. It took me to a page that…
(disclaimer: I am the VP of Prod/Eng at Synadia)
NATS - An application connectivity technology (L7). It was originally designed for low-latency M:N messaging, and that is still true today. In 2018, native multi-tenancy, clustering options, etc. got introduced. The persistence subsystem (JetStream) was introduced in 2021. It has a completely different design than Kafka, but with overlapping use cases. For better or worse, we get compared to Kafka a lot and virtually everyone who engages realizes the advantages and opportunities. NATS is much more flexible for application use cases, for example, it provides KeyValue and ObjectStore abstractions on top of the core persistent stream. There are a plethora of other details, but that is the basic gist. Overall, it has a lot of batteries included for building everything from embedded applications to large scale cloud-to-edge systems.
Synadia - The founder (Derek) created NATS. We are the primary maintainers of the project. We build products and services on top of NATS including a global SaaS where you can sign up and use "hosted NATS" with additional features. We offer a BYOC model, one of which we manage for you, or a Kubernetes-based self-service one that you deploy yourself. We also support fully self-hosted for customers that need to run in their own data centers or at the edge.
Regarding the comment re: the website, there are improvements we have in the works. Happy to engage and help clarify anything that is confusing.
Re: TigerBeetle and Synadia pledge $512k to the Zig Software Foundation
#125Joran from TigerBeetle here! Zig has changed my life, and our team, by making TigerBeetle possible. It's been an incredible journey these past 5 years, and excited that we can now pay it back (and forward!) to the Zig Software Foundation, also matching with my friend Derek Collison and Synadia in doing so. Thanks to Andrew for creating something beautifully special for the world in Zig, and to all the Zig core team a…
I’d be really curious to know if there have ever been major snags being such an early adopter of a language (relative to comparable language options)?
Re: TigerBeetle and Synadia pledge $512k to the Zig Software Foundation
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
In a way, it's a return to simpler times. I remember learning programming C and it was about programming computers, not abstract concepts. As languages got higher level abstractions, we lost touch with the computer. That's why programs are so bloated today. Zig respects that we are programming a computer, with concrete behaviours, it doesn't try to abstract things away, doesn't hide complexity, and yet gives you tool…
Yet computers are abstract concepts :-) And C is basically high level assembly for the PDP, which has little in common with x86, for example.
>Yet computers are abstract concepts :-)
And food is just molecules, but we don't eat chairs because they're also molecules.
Re: TigerBeetle and Synadia pledge $512k to the Zig Software Foundation
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
I strongly disagree. I can see why you would want to use Zig, especially if you absolutely need complete low level code and only care about pretty decent memory safety (which is valid in many scenarios). But if those don't apply Rust is much nicer. Stuff like string manipulation is almost as painful as it is in C.
As far as I can tell, Zig's niche compared to Rust is to specifically cater to certain design patterns that C and C++ support, but other languages don't. E.g., anything that uses pointer manipulation for business logic.
I think it's more about low level control of allocation.
You can do "pointer manipulation" in safe Rust if you need to - anything that uses arena indices is basically that, e.g. petgraph.
The language wasn't really designed for it though so it isn't exactly integrated into the syntax.
But controlling allocation precisely is quite difficult in "normal" Rust.
Tbh I don't think it is actually that far away from Rust. It's aimed more at low level stuff, whereas Rust aims to do every level. It is more "trust me bro" than Rust's "no I'm going to check" safety. And comptime is pretty different to Rust's approach (arguably better).
But apart from that they seem to have very similar goals.
Re: TigerBeetle and Synadia pledge $512k to the Zig Software Foundation
#128The Synadia story posted here[1]. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45703716
(we've since merged that thread into this one)
Re: TigerBeetle and Synadia pledge $512k to the Zig Software Foundation
#129I'm absolutely struggling to understand what Synadia even does. it's been an infuriating experience navigating through their marketing site. It's been minutes and I still don't understand what it is. What is NATS? Edit: I had to google what NATS.IO is. The marketing site is infuriatingly useless. Please, can we stop doing this? Edit: At the bottom on the footer it says compare NATS to Kafka. It took me to a page that…
i asked gemini to investigate on my behalf, and it basically said that Synadia is to NATS what HiveMQ is to MQTT. seems fair enough. thank goodness for llms to spare us the marketing drivel!
Unfortunately the LLM is leading you astray :)
Re: TigerBeetle and Synadia pledge $512k to the Zig Software Foundation
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rust needs stronger compile-time features and capabilities if it wants to be a better C++. This is critical functionality for many types of safety.
Are you trying to claim that Rust isn't safer than C++ for some kind of safety? I can't really see how you would argue that. It's memory safe, and it has a much stronger type system which reduces the chance of non-memory safety bugs. What type of safety are you thinking of?
Rust lacks type-programming features necessary for pragmatic type safety without performance concessions.