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Zig – io_uring and Grand Central Dispatch std.Io implementations landed

ziglang.org

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Re: Zig – io_uring and Grand Central Dispatch std.Io implementations landed

#61

Post by kristoff_it »

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #44
Pay08 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't be so sure about that. I do think there's a bit of scope creep, especially with the LLVM replacement stuff, but I don't think it's bad enough for the language to never come out. Most notable languages have at least one large corporate sponsor behind them, Zig doesn't.

I’m a casual user and the 0.16 changes scare me. I tried multiple attempts now, even with full LLM support to upgrade and the result is just a) painful and b) not very good. I have high doubts that the current IO system of 0.16 will make it for another release given the consequences of their choices.

Here's some advice:

1. if you're a casual user (ie you don't follow the development) don't try incomplete APIs that not even the creators of fully know how they are supposed to work (because they're still tinkering with them) also you can't expect docs until the design is somewhat finalized (which is not yet, fyi)

2. llms don't help when trying to make sense of the above (a feature that is not complete, that has no docs other than some hints in commit messages, that changes every other commit), reserve llms for when things are stable and well documented, otherwise they will just confuse you further.

If you want to try new features before they land in a tagged release, you must engage with the development process at the very least.

Re: Zig – io_uring and Grand Central Dispatch std.Io implementations landed

#62

Post by ivanjermakov »

gethly wrote: post #2

[flagged]

When in comes to programmming languages, I would rather see a language done right after 20 years of development than what we see today with all mainstream languages splatting features and breaking changes without care for overall language conciesness and usability.

See Python 2->3, Rust async traits, Go generics, C++... basically everything.

Re: Zig – io_uring and Grand Central Dispatch std.Io implementations landed

#63

Post by pjmlp »

WJW wrote: post #58
pjmlp wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fallacy of that argument would be if its author would seek adoption, however like Naughty Dog with their Lisp based language, John has no plans to have Jai win world adoption beyone his game engine.

That may be, but OP tried to claim that > once Jai comes out, Zig will become obsolete If Jai is happy to have limited adoption (which is fine), other languages will by definition not be displaced by Jai. That is even if we accept OPs implied point, that Jai is good enough to displace Zig, without further discussion. But even that seems to be rather doubtful.

Agreed, however I also think Zig will be another Coffee Script, PureScript, Elm,...

I advise to revisit HN posts about them.

Re: Zig – io_uring and Grand Central Dispatch std.Io implementations landed

#64

Post by pjmlp »

tosh wrote: post #57
pjmlp wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except for Tiger Beetle customers and the few ones using Bun, what traction?

Ghostty https://ghostty.org

Another one to the list, however it hardly sounds like a killer application.

Re: Zig – io_uring and Grand Central Dispatch std.Io implementations landed

#65

Post by pjmlp »

ofalkaed wrote: post #53
pjmlp wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One should try, while being aware of the realities of language adoption. I disagree Zig is that great deal of a language, it would have been if we were talking about 1990's programming language ecosystem, not in 21st century. Use-after-free problems should not be something we still need to worry about, when tooling like PurifyPlus trace back to 1992.

I don't think Andrew believes Zig is going kill C or C++, he probably has hope but I think he is aware of the reality. He found a way to make a living on something he was passionate about. Use-after-free is a fact of life until something kills C, but the realities of language adoption are against that. Zig seems interesting and worthwhile in offering a different perspective on the problem and does it in a way more ag…

For that to matter OS vendors that only care about C on their platforms, have to also care about Zig.

Otherwise the only users are going to be the ones happy to do some yak shaving instead of the actual application code with the vendor tools.

It also ignores that C doesn't stand still, the competition is C2y, not C89.

Re: Zig – io_uring and Grand Central Dispatch std.Io implementations landed

#66

Post by jauntywundrkind »

Contrary to the neggies, I am positive in Zigs effort to iterate & improve.

Right now there is no language that is good at io-uring. There are ok offerings, but nothing really has modern async joy that works with uring.

Whoever hammers out a good solution here is going to have a massive leg up. Rust is amazing in so many ways but it has been quite a brutal road to trying to support io-uring ok, and efforts are still a bit primitive, shall we say. If Zig can nail this down that would be fantastic!!

I would way rather Zig keep learning and keep changing, keep making new and better. Than to have it try to appease those who are too conservative for the project, unwilling to accept change and improvement, people focused on stability. It takes a lot of learning to make really good systems, to play with fit and finish. Zig is doing the good work. Imo we ought be thankful.

Re: Zig – io_uring and Grand Central Dispatch std.Io implementations landed

#67

Post by alexrp »

ozgrakkurt wrote: post #55
rurban wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Instead of debating for years (like other languages), zig just tries things out. Good > Worst case you can always rollback changes. No, you cannot. People will leave in masses. In perl they announced experiments with a mandatory use experimental :feature. You couldnt publish modules with those, or else you are at risk. This made perl exciting and fresh. Python on the other hand constantly broke API's, and had to in…

I recently ditched zig because of this. I thought it was stable enough initially but they completely broke fuzz testing feature and didn’t fix it. Also build system API and some other APIs change and it is super annoying. Find it much better to use c23 with _BitInt integers and some macros and context passing for error handling. Also some things like stack traces were broken in small ways in zig. It would report wron…

It sounds like you expected 1.0 stability from a language that isn't 1.0.

> I thought it was stable enough initially but they completely broke fuzz testing feature and didn’t fix it.

From the 0.14.0 release notes:

> Zig 0.14.0 ships with an integrated fuzzer. It is alpha quality status, which means that using it requires participating in the development process.

How could we possibly have been more explicit?

Fuzzing will be a major component of Zig's testing strategy in the long term, but we clearly haven't had the time to get it into shape yet. But we also didn't claim to have done!

> Also some things like stack traces were broken in small ways in zig. It would report wrong lines in stack traces when compiling with optimizations. Also wasn’t able to cleanly collect stack traces into strings in production build.

I mean, to be fair, most compiled languages can't give you 100% accurate source-level stack traces in release builds. But that aside, we have actually invested quite a lot of effort into std.debug in the 0.16.0 release cycle, and you should now get significantly better and more reliable stack traces on all supported platforms. If you encounter a case where you don't, file a bug.

> And recently saw they even moved the time/Instant API to some other place too. This kind of thing is just super annoying with seemingly no benefit. Could have left the same API there and re-used it from somewhere else. But no, have to make it “perfect”

I acknowledge that API churn can be annoying, but it would be weird not to aim for perfection prior to 1.0.

Re: Zig – io_uring and Grand Central Dispatch std.Io implementations landed

#68

Post by lukaslalinsky »

I don't want to be the negative guy, but this is news about two unfinished implementations. There is a lot of work needed for this to be considered done. For example, no networking in the GCD version yet. And as these are being implemented, the interface stops being an interface, the vtable keeps growing, and it's just the current snapshot of what's needed by the std implementations.

Re: Zig – io_uring and Grand Central Dispatch std.Io implementations landed

#69

Post by pygy_ »

BrouteMinou wrote: post #59

I feel like it's worthless to keep up with Zig until they reach 1.0. That thing, right here, is probably going to be rewritten 5 times and what not. If you are actively using Zig (for some reasons?), I guess it's a great news, but for the Grand Majority of the devs in here, it's like an announcement that it's raining in Kuldîga... So m'yeah. I was following Zig for a while, but I just don't think I am going to see a…

I wouldn't have expected graphic sex slang to be acceptable as a NH user name.

This would translate as ~"eats pussy", where "broûter" is a verb reserved for animals feeding on grass, implying a hefty bush.

Re: Zig – io_uring and Grand Central Dispatch std.Io implementations landed

#70

Post by brabel »

gethly wrote: post #20
norman784 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have my doubts on Jai, besides being built towards game development, from what I read/watched about it, it has 2 or 3 meta programming capabilities, like comptime, macros, etc it feels too much of the same, also Jai is not built towards correctness or safety, John mentality is that he knows what he is doing, so he doesn’t need those guardrails and he wants instead expressiveness. Also Jai is like C++ in complexity,…

Remember that it was Jai that inspired all these new languages. When you talk about the capabilities like comptime, that's all from Jai and why John no longer does public presentations(as people keep stealing his unfinished ideas). Your comment about gamedev focus makes no sense as that it the most hardcore segment of all the programming there is. So if a language is good for gamedev, it's good for everything else -…

> When you talk about the capabilities like comptime, that's all from Jai

You really should learn a few new languages if you think that’s remotely true. For example, Lisp macros are the distant ancestors of most metaprogramming techniques, dating from the 60s. But there are many similar techniques that precede Zig comptime and Jai, like D’s mixins and templates, which together have very similar power to comptime. There are also Nim macros which I believe also precede Jai. Even the C preprocessor could probably be considered an inspiration for anyone creating a C competitor before we need to invoke Jai ideas.

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