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Zig Libc

ziglang.org

1–10 of 196 posts

Re: Zig Libc

#3
Super cool project.

I expect a lot of C code may be quite mechanically translated to Zig (by help of LLMs). Unlike C->Rust or C->C++, where there's more of a paradigm shift.

Re: Zig Libc

#4
"Furthermore, when this work is combined with the recent std.Io changes, there is potential for users to seamlessly control how libc performs I/O - for example forcing all calls to read and write to participate in an io_uring event loop"

This is exciting! I particularly care more about kqueue but I guess the quote applies to it too.

Re: Zig Libc

#5
This strikes me as a very agent-friendly problem. Given a harness that enforces sufficiently-rigorous tests, I'm sure you could spin up an agent loop that methodically churns through these functions one by one, finishing in a few days.

Re: Zig Libc

#6
Cool idea, for sure, but I can't help but wonder: for the code that's been ported, is there a concern that you'd have to perpetually watch out for CVEs in glibc/musl and determine if they also apply to the Zig implementations?

Re: Zig Libc

#7
post #5

This strikes me as a very agent-friendly problem. Given a harness that enforces sufficiently-rigorous tests, I'm sure you could spin up an agent loop that methodically churns through these functions one by one, finishing in a few days.

Have you ever used an LLM with Zig? It will generate syntactically invalid code. Zig breaks so often and LLMs have such an eternally old knowledge cutoff that they only know old ass broken versions.

The same goes for TLA+ and all the other obscure things people think would be great to use with LLMs, and they would, if there was as much training data as there was for JavaScript and Python.

Re: Zig Libc

#8
post #5

This strikes me as a very agent-friendly problem. Given a harness that enforces sufficiently-rigorous tests, I'm sure you could spin up an agent loop that methodically churns through these functions one by one, finishing in a few days.

[deleted]

Re: Zig Libc

#9
post #3

Super cool project. I expect a lot of C code may be quite mechanically translated to Zig (by help of LLMs). Unlike C->Rust or C->C++, where there's more of a paradigm shift.

There's solid reason for the translation here; the Zig core team is aiming to eliminate duplicated code and C functions, and avoid the need to track libc from multiple sources. In the future, LLMs could serve as part of this, but they are currently quite terrible at Zig (as far as I understand it, it's not a lack of Zig code samples, it's an imbalance of OLD Zig to NEW Zig, as Zig changes quite frequently).

You would need to consider if it is even worth it translating your C code. If the paradigm is identical and the entire purpose would be "haha it is now one language," surely you could just compile and link the C code with libzigc... In my opinion, it's not worth translating code if the benefit of "hey look one language" requires the cost of "let's pray the LLM didn't hallucinate or make a mistake while translating the code."

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