91–100 of 144 posts
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I don't think it's really that bad in Rust. If you're happy with an arena in Zig you can do exactly the same thing in Rust. There are a ton of options listed here: https://donsz.nl/blog/arenas/ Some of them even prevent use after free (the "ABA mitigation" column).
Which is hardly any different from me using PurifyPlus back in 2000.
This reminds me of the Servo project's journey. Always impressed to see another implementation of the WHATWG specs. It's interesting to see Zig being chosen here over Rust for a browser engine component. Rust has kind of become the default answer for "safe browser components" (e.g., Servo, Firefox's oxidation), primarily because the borrow checker maps so well to the ownership model of a DOM tree in theory. But in pr…
Hi, I am Francis, founder of Lightpanda. We wrote a full article explaining why we choose Zig over Rust or C++, if you are interested: https://lightpanda.io/blog/posts/why-we-built-lightpanda-in-... Our goal is to build a headless browser, rather than a general purpose browser like Servo or Chrome. It's already available if you would like to try it: https://lightpanda.io/docs/open-source/installation
When I read your site copy it struck me as either naive to that, or a somewhat misleading comparison, my feedback would be just to address it directly alongside Chrome.
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Hi, I am Francis, founder of Lightpanda. We wrote a full article explaining why we choose Zig over Rust or C++, if you are interested: https://lightpanda.io/blog/posts/why-we-built-lightpanda-in-... Our goal is to build a headless browser, rather than a general purpose browser like Servo or Chrome. It's already available if you would like to try it: https://lightpanda.io/docs/open-source/installation
Respectfully, for browser-based work, simplicity is absolutely not a good enough reason to use a memory-unsafe language. Your claim that Zig is in some way safer than Rust for something like this is flat out untrue.
A language which is not 1.0, and has repeatedly changed its IO implementation in a non-backwards-compatible way is certainly a courageous choice for production code.
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> It has for Amazon, Adobe, Microsoft, Google and the Linux kernel. I don't think so. I don't know about Adobe, but it's not a meaningful statement for the rest. Those companies default to writing safe code in languages other than Rust, and the Linux kernel defaults to unsafe code in C. BTW, languages favoured by those projects/companies do not reliably represent industry-wide preferences, let alone defaults. You cou…
It is a clear mandate on those companies that whatever used to be C or C++, should be written in Rust for green field development. Whatever could be done in programming languages with automatic memory management was already being done. Anyone deploying serverless code into Amazon instances is running of top of Firecracker, my phone has Rust code running on it, and whatever Windows 11 draws something into the screen,…
This is a political achievement, not technical one. People are bitter about it as it doesn't feel organic and feel pushed onto them.
This reminds me of the Servo project's journey. Always impressed to see another implementation of the WHATWG specs. It's interesting to see Zig being chosen here over Rust for a browser engine component. Rust has kind of become the default answer for "safe browser components" (e.g., Servo, Firefox's oxidation), primarily because the borrow checker maps so well to the ownership model of a DOM tree in theory. But in pr…
Hi, I am Francis, founder of Lightpanda. We wrote a full article explaining why we choose Zig over Rust or C++, if you are interested: https://lightpanda.io/blog/posts/why-we-built-lightpanda-in-... Our goal is to build a headless browser, rather than a general purpose browser like Servo or Chrome. It's already available if you would like to try it: https://lightpanda.io/docs/open-source/installation
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> So it's effectively a net+DOM+script-only browser with no style/layout/paint. > --- > Definitely fun for me to watch as someone who is making a lightweight browser engine with a different set of trade-offs (net+DOM+style/layout/paint-only with no script) Both projects (Lightpanda, DioxusLabs/blitz) sound very interesting to me. What do you think about rendering patterns that require both script+layout for rendering…
So Blitz does technically have scripting, it's just Rust scripting rather than JavaScript scripting. So the plan for virtual scrolling would likely be to implement it in Rust. If your aim is to render a UI (ala Electron/Flutter) then we have a React-style framework (Dioxus) that runs on top of Blitz, and allows you access to the low-level Rust API of the DOM for advanced use cases (although it's still a WIP and this…
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I'm not super experienced with zig, but I always think that in the same way that rust forces you to think about ownership (by having the borrow checker - note: I think of this as a good thing personally) zig makes you think upfront about your allocation (by making everything that can allocate take an allocator argument.). It makes everything very explicit, and you can always _see_ where your allocations are happening…
That's true and I liked the idea of it until I started writing some Zig where I needed to work with strings. Very painful. I'm sure you typically get a bit faster string manipulation code than what you'd get with Rust but I don't think it's worth the cost (Rust is pretty fast already).
I hate to say it, but time is quickly running out for Zig(( AI might never pick it up properly and without that it will never go out of its niche
Are you implying that programming languages are now going to be “frozen” because of AI? I can understand the source of concern but I wouldn’t expect innovation to stop. The world isn’t going to pause because of a knowledge cutoff date.
I really like Zig, I wish it appeared several years earlier. But rewriting everything in Zig might just not have practical sense soon.
This reminds me of the Servo project's journey. Always impressed to see another implementation of the WHATWG specs. It's interesting to see Zig being chosen here over Rust for a browser engine component. Rust has kind of become the default answer for "safe browser components" (e.g., Servo, Firefox's oxidation), primarily because the borrow checker maps so well to the ownership model of a DOM tree in theory. But in pr…
And use-after-free, when that arena's memory goes away.