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Why is Zig so cool?

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Re: Why is Zig so cool?

#111

Post by tourist2d »

unscaled wrote: post #93

I'm afraid this article kinda fails at at its job. It starts out with a very bold claim ("Zig is not only a new programming language, but it’s a totally new way to write programs"), but ends up listing a bunch of features that are not unique to Zig or even introduced by Zig: type inference (Invented in the late 60s, first practically implemented in the 80s), anonymous structs (C#, Go, Typescript, many ML-style langua…

As a c++ developer who's heard of Zig but never dived into it, I was reading this article scratching my head wondering what is it actually so unique about it.

Why the blog has a section on how it install it on the path is also very puzzling.

Re: Why is Zig so cool?

#112

Post by phplovesong »

unscaled wrote: post #93

I'm afraid this article kinda fails at at its job. It starts out with a very bold claim ("Zig is not only a new programming language, but it’s a totally new way to write programs"), but ends up listing a bunch of features that are not unique to Zig or even introduced by Zig: type inference (Invented in the late 60s, first practically implemented in the 80s), anonymous structs (C#, Go, Typescript, many ML-style langua…

Agreed.

But i would not put comptime as some sort of magical invention. Its still just a newish take on meta programming. We had that since forever. From my minimal time with Zig i kind of think comptime as a better version of c++ templates.

That said Zig is possibly a better alternative to c++, but not that exiting for me. I kind of dont get why so many think its the holy grail, first it was rust, and now zig.

Re: Why is Zig so cool?

#113

Post by sarchertech »

foobar1726 wrote: post #55
sarchertech wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Type inference has left academy and proliferated into mainstream languages for so many years that I almost forgot that it's a worth mentioning feature. It’s not common in lower level languages without garbage collectors or languages focused on compilation speed.

C++ added auto 14 years ago. Swift had it since day 1 back in 2014 if I remember right. What else is there?

C, Ada, Fortran, Pascal.

Re: Why is Zig so cool?

#114

Post by ksenzee »

BoorishBears wrote: post #107
TylerE wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment deserves a [citation needed] visible from geosynchronous orbit.

[flagged]

Sometimes if a joke doesn't land, it's because the joke wasn't funny. (Also, yes, a lot of folks here are autistic, maybe cool it with the veiled insults.)

Re: Why is Zig so cool?

#115

Post by jibal »

krosaen wrote: post #92

I like the idea of the `defer `keyword - you can have automatic cleanup at the end of the scope but you have to make it obvious you are doing so, no hidden execution of anything (unlike c++ destructors).

Adopted from go, first appeared in D, invented by one of its major developers, Andrei Alexandrescu.

Re: Why is Zig so cool?

#116

Post by jibal »

sreekotay wrote: post #17
pron wrote: post #6

> I can’t think of any other language in my 45 years long career that surprised more than Zig. I can say the same (although my career spans only 30 years), or, more accurately, that it's one of the few languages that surprised me most. Coming to it from a language design perspective, what surprised me is just how far partial evaluation can be taken. While strictly weaker than AST macros in expressive power (macros ar…

This is the real answer (amongst other goodness) - this one is well executed and differentiated Every language at scale needs a preprocessor (look at the “use server” and “use gpu” silliness happening in TS) - why is it not the the same as the language you use?

Languages such as D and Nim (both greatly underappreciated) offer full-language compile-time interpretation.

Re: Why is Zig so cool?

#117

Post by jandrewrogers »

sho_hn wrote: post #103
jandrewrogers wrote: post #100

One of the things I like about Zig is that it pretty explicitly recognizes all the weird edge cases that exist in low-level systems code. A rather large cross-section of languages kind of pretend these cases don’t exist because addressing it would violate the aesthetic they are trying to achieve with the language. Nonetheless, these are real cases because low-level hardware and system behavior doesn’t care about aest…

Interesting, but really in need of some examples.

I would highlight `std::launder` as an example. It was added in C++17. Famously, most people have no idea what it is used for or why it exists. For low-level systems it was a godsend because there wasn’t an official way to express the intent, though compilers left backdoors open because some things require it.

It generates no code, it is a compiler barrier related to constant folding and lifetime analysis that is particularly useful when operating on objects in DMA memory. As far as a compiler is concerned DMA doesn’t exist, it is a Deus Ex Machina. This is an annotation to the compiler that everything it thinks it understands about the contents and lifetime of a bit of memory is now voided and it has to start over. This case is endemic in high-end database engines.

It should be noted that `std::launder` only works for different instances of the same type. If you want to dynamically re-type memory there is a different set of APIs for informing the compiler that DMA dropped a completely different type in the same memory address.

All of this is compiled down to nothing. It annotates for the compiler things it can’t understand just by inspecting the code.

Re: Why is Zig so cool?

#118

Post by jibal »

andyferris wrote: post #35
pron wrote: post #6

> I can’t think of any other language in my 45 years long career that surprised more than Zig. I can say the same (although my career spans only 30 years), or, more accurately, that it's one of the few languages that surprised me most. Coming to it from a language design perspective, what surprised me is just how far partial evaluation can be taken. While strictly weaker than AST macros in expressive power (macros ar…

I agree. I look forward to a future high-level language that uses something like comptime for metaprogramming/interfaces/etc, is strongly typed, but lets you write scripts as easily as python or javascript.

D and Nim both offer that. D has a tool, rdmd, that compiles (with caching) and runs a script written in D, so you write

#!/usr/bin/env rdmd D code ...

and run it as if it were an executable.

Re: Why is Zig so cool?

#119

Post by jibal »

elcritch wrote: post #37
andyferris wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. I look forward to a future high-level language that uses something like comptime for metaprogramming/interfaces/etc, is strongly typed, but lets you write scripts as easily as python or javascript.

Tryout Nim, it has powerful comptime/metaprogramming, statically typed, automatic memory management and is as easy to program as python or javascript while still allowing low level stuff. For me it'd be hard to go back to languages that don't have all that. Only swift comes close.

D comes close ... it too has a full-language comptime interpreter and other metaprgramming features (though not as rich as Nim's), statically typed, optional garbage collection, and you can write

#!/usr/bin/env rdmd

[D code]

and run it as if it were an executable. (The compilation is cached so it runs just as fast on subsequent runs.)

Re: Why is Zig so cool?

#120

Post by jibal »

robotresearcher wrote: post #38

> Probably the most incredible virtue of Zig compiler is its ability to compile C code. This associated with the ability to cross-compile code to be run in another architecture, different than the machine where it is was originally compiled, is already something quite different and unique. Isn't cross compilation very, very ordinary? Inline C is cool, like C has inline ASM (for the target arch). But cross-compiling?…

If you install Zig, you can now generate executables for virtually any target with just a CLI argument specifying the target, regardless of what machine you installed it on. Nothing else does that--cross compilation generally requires compiling the compiler to target a different architecture.
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