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Why is Zig so cool?

nilostolte.github.io

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Re: Why is Zig so cool?

#311

Post by pjmlp »

1718627440 wrote: post #306
pjmlp wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, that is what pedantic folks without English grammar knowledge keep complaining about, instead of actually discussing better security practices in both languages. It is a bikeshedding discussion that doesn't help in anything, regarding lack of security in C, or the legions of folks that keep using C data types in C++, including bare bones null terminated strings and plain arrays instead of collection types with b…

In my opinion, this is an important issue and not "bikeshedding", but it can be discussed whether the term "C/C++" is always an example of that idea or not. I think it is not, but it is connected enough, that I won't use it to side step the issues.

So there will be zero C language constructs, and C standard library functions being called, on your C++ source code?

Re: Why is Zig so cool?

#312

Post by rixed »

librasteve wrote: post #129
jandrewrogers wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "correct" way is highly context dependent with the added proviso that Zig assumes a low-level systems context. In this context, adding data to an error may be expedient but 1) it has a non-trivial overhead on average and 2) may be inadvisable in some circumstances due to system state. I haven't written any systems in Zig yet but in low-level high-performance C++20 code bases we basically do the same thing when it…

For quite a long time, I have been wondering why I like to code in Raku so much … in a round about way you set me thinking. Perhaps it’s because, in Raku, precision, performance and determinism take a back seat to expediency. (Sorry for the tangent).

Went to have a look to the (beautiful and informative) website for the raku language to refresh my memory, and looking at the examples I though "Oh god, those sigills, those criptic short keywords... it looks like a modern perl, I doubt we would be happy together", then I went to wikipedia to check and yes indeed, that's perl 6! I'll pass. :)

Re: Why is Zig so cool?

#313

Post by aib »

SonnyTark wrote: post #305

This is a very confusing blog post. I found myself looking for ChatGPT markers because it doesn't make sense to say: omg zig is so much cooler than C here's why, then start listing the absolute basics of the language that are identical in most modern languages without any actual reflection why writing the same thing in a different syntax somehow makes zig superior?

You're absolutely correct!

The "how to modify an environment variable" bit and the bin-dec-hex table made me feel the same way. Then I saw the part explaining how to check for duplicates in a row... I'm struggling to understand the point of the article. Testing a text generator?

Re: Why is Zig so cool?

#314

Post by Xss3 »

qouteall wrote: post #130
MrJohz wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly, I just read an article from matklad (who works a lot with Zig) talking about the benefits of splitting up error codes and error diagnostics, and the pattern of using a diagnostic sync to provide human-readable diagnostic information: https://matklad.github.io/2025/11/06/error-codes-for-control... Honestly I was quite convinced by that, because it kind of matches my own experiences that, even when using…

I agree that building a special diagnostic system is better than just using language's builtin error system. However that takes efforts. Library developers tend to choose the path of least resistance, which is to not pass diagnostic information. The most convenient diagonistic system is the good old logging. Logging is easy. Maybe logging will be the de facto solution of passing error data in Zig ecosystem, due to ps…

I tend to follow the rest of the ecosystem when developing libraries. If i wanted to make a zig lib id look at what other major libs are doing (or not doing) and copy that.

If i found no consistency id be making a post like OP but from a different perspective.

Re: Why is Zig so cool?

#315

Post by jadbox »

WalterBright wrote: post #150
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…

D has had compile time function execution since 2007 or so. https://dlang.org/spec/function.html#interpretation It doesn't need a keyword to trigger it. Any expression that is a const-expression in the grammar triggers it.

Hi Walter! Big fan. What do you think of Zig? How would you like to see it evolve? Are there any things from Zig that inspire you to work in D?

Re: Why is Zig so cool?

#316

Post by nomdep »

brucehoult wrote: post #43
rvrb wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

out of curiosity, what feature do you want?

The feature I want is multimethods -- function overloading based on the runtime (not compile time) type of all the arguments. Programming with it is magical, and its a huge drag to go back to languages without it. Just so much better than common OOP that depends only on the type of one special argument (self, this etc). Common Lisp has had it forever, and Dylan transferred that to a language with more conventional sy…

Erlang/Elixir also has that

Re: Why is Zig so cool?

#317

Post by rurban »

zbentley wrote: post #290
rurban wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perl5 had it before. Either by constant-folding, or by BEGIN blocks. Constant-folding just got watered down by the many dynamic evangelists in the decades after, that even C or C++ didn't enforce it properly. In perl5 is was watered down on add (+) by some hilariously wrong argumentation then. So you could precompute mult const expressions, but not add.

How are perl5’s BEGIN blocks equivalent to comptime? It’s been awhile, but I recall BEGIN blocks executing at require time—which, in complicated pre-forking setups that had to be careful about only requiring certain modules later during program execution because they did dumb things like opening connections when loaded, meant that reasoning about BEGIN blocks required a lot more careful thought than reasoning about c…

BEGIN blocks execute at compile-time. require is just a wrapper to load a module at compile-time.

When you want to use state, like openening a file for run-time, use INIT blocks instead. These are executed first before runtime, after compile-time.

My perl compiler dumps the state of the program after compile-time. So everything executed in BEGIN blocks is already evaluated. Opening a file in BEGIN would not open it later when required at run-time, and compile-time from run-time is seperated. All BGEIN state is constant-folded.

Re: Why is Zig so cool?

#318

Post by the__alchemist »

johnisgood wrote: post #185
the__alchemist wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For anyone not familiar: You can bundle arbitrary software as Python wheels. Can be convenient in cases like this!

What "cases" are those? Tell me one useful and neat case. Why is it useful and neat, you think?

For one example, a number of years back, I built a python package, env, and version manager. It was built entirely Rust and distributed as a binary. Since I know users would likely have pip installed, it provided an easy way for them to install, regardless of OS.

You could go further like in this case, and use wheels + PyPi for something unrelated to Python.

Re: Why is Zig so cool?

#319

Post by audunw »

Galanwe wrote: post #247
pyrolistical wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can see pros and cons. Preventing data being attached to an error forces more clear and precise errors. Whereas lazy devs could just attach all possible data in a giant generic error if they don’t want to think about it.

> Preventing data being attached to an error forces more clear and precise errors. Okay maybe theorically, but in the real world I would like to have the filename on a "file not found", an address on a "connection timeout", a retry count on a "too many failures", etc.

But also in the real world I may not be interested in any error information for the library I’m using. I’d like to be able to pass a null for the error information structure and have the compile optimize away everything related to tracking and storing error information.

I’d like my parser library to be able to give me the exact file, line and column number an error occurred. But I’d also like to use the library in a “just give me an error if something failed, I don’t really care why” mode.

Re: Why is Zig so cool?

#320

Post by raldu »

SonnyTark wrote: post #305

This is a very confusing blog post. I found myself looking for ChatGPT markers because it doesn't make sense to say: omg zig is so much cooler than C here's why, then start listing the absolute basics of the language that are identical in most modern languages without any actual reflection why writing the same thing in a different syntax somehow makes zig superior?

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