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

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

#131

Post by Tuna-Fish »

zozbot234 wrote: post #129
solatic wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To each his own, but while I can certainly understand the hesitancy of an architect to pick Zig for a project that is projected to hit 100k+ lines of code, I really think you're missing out. There is a business case to using Zig today. True in general but in the cloud especially, saving server resources can make a significant impact on the bottom line. There are not nearly enough performance engineers who understand…

> ...in the cloud especially, saving server resources can make a significant impact on the bottom line. There are not nearly enough performance engineers who understand how to take inefficient systems and make improvements to move towards theoretical maximum efficiency. That's a very good point, actually. However... > with fewer footguns ..the Crab People[0] would definitely quibble with that particular claim of your…

I would quibble with all of the claims, other than easier to learn.

I really see no advantage for Zig over Rust after you get past that 2 first two weeks.

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

#132

Post by kartoffelsaft »

zozbot234 wrote: post #124
sgt wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think Rust and Zig really don't overlap much when it comes to target audience. E.g. if you're attracted to Rust, you'll probably find Zig terrible (and the other way around). This is ironic since these two crowds are mostly solving the same type of problems. It's just democrats vs republicans type of split, some of it is just for show and philosophical.

Rust is solving the memory safety problem, Zig is solving the 'idiomatic interop with existing C coding patterns' problem. These couldn't be more different - C-like idiomatic code is generally antithetical to 'safe' modularity since it often relies on tacit global invariants for correct behavior. Interestingly, Carbon is kinda trying to tackle both at the same time (though starting from C++ in their case) which is a…

I hear Cardon get mention on rare occasion, and with how rare that is I have to assume it's been completely stagnant. Does it offer anything over C++ in current year? Seems like C++ interop begets turning your language into C++ with different syntax in a way that C interop just doesn't.

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

#133

Post by pmarreck »

PaulRobinson wrote: post #117
pmarreck wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An AI will be able to handle updating your code for 95% of your breaking changes

No it won't. LLMs are good at dealing with things they've seen before, not at novel things. When novel things arise, you will either have to burn a shed ton of tokens on "reasoning", hand hold them (so you're doing advanced find and replace in this example, where you have to be incredibly precise and detailed about your language, to the point it might be quicker to just make the changes), or you have to wait until th…

Apologies, but your information is either outdated from lack of experience with the latest frontier models, or you don't realize the fact that 99.9% of the work you do is not novel in all capacities. Have you only used Copilot, or something? Because that's what it sounds like. Since the performance of the latest models (Opus 4.6 max-effort, gpt-5.3-Codex) is nothing short of astonishing.

Real-world example: Claude isn't familiar with the latest Zig, so I had it write a language guide for 0.15.2 (here: https://gist.github.com/pmarreck/44d95e869036027f9edf332ce9a...) which pointed out all the differences, and that's been extremely helpful in having me not even have to touch a line of code to do the updates.

On top of that, for any Zig dependency I pull in which is written to an earlier version, I have forked it and applied these updates correctly (or it has, under my guidance, really), 100% of the time.

On the off chance that guide is not in its context, it has seen the expected warning or error message, googled it, and done the correct correction 100% of the time. Which is exactly what a human would do.

Let's play the falsifiability game: Find me a real-world example of an upgrade to a newer API from the just-previous-to-that API that a modern LLM will fail to do correctly. Your choice of beer or coffee awaits you if you provide a link to it.

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

#134

Post by Philpax »

PaulRobinson wrote: post #117
pmarreck wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An AI will be able to handle updating your code for 95% of your breaking changes

No it won't. LLMs are good at dealing with things they've seen before, not at novel things. When novel things arise, you will either have to burn a shed ton of tokens on "reasoning", hand hold them (so you're doing advanced find and replace in this example, where you have to be incredibly precise and detailed about your language, to the point it might be quicker to just make the changes), or you have to wait until th…

Eh, I've had good luck with porting codebases to newer versions of Bevy by pointing CC to the migration guide, and that is harder to test than a language migration (as much of the changed behaviour would have been at runtime).

I still wouldn't want to deal with that much churn in my language, but I fully believe an agent could handle the majority of, if not all of, the migration between versions.

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

#135

Post by BrouteMinou »

rererereferred wrote: post #123
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…

No shame in waiting for 1.0. Specially if you want to read docs rather than the code itself.

Akctuyally, reading the code instead of a documentation is one of the nice part of Zig.

It is such a readable language that I found it easier learning the API than most languages.

Zig has this on its side. Reading the unit tests directly from the code give, most of the time, a good example too.

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

#136

Post by pron »

metaltyphoon wrote: post #118
pron wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the worry is by the time it reaches v1 Rust will have consumed the space that C/C++ used to Given that Rust is quite an old language now and its adoption is still so low, I don't think that should be much of a worry, although that doesn't mean Zig will be the option of choice, and not stabilising is certainly not a good sign. At Rust's adoption rate, a language that hasn't been invented yet and that would show a mo…

> Given that Rust is quite an old language now and its adoption is still so low, So being part of 3 major OS (Windows, Android and now Linux), the big 3 cloud providers having SDKs for the language, used by so much tooling (js + python) and being part of major internet infrastructure means its “slow” adoption then wow…

Very much so once you compare it to how quickly C++ (and, in fact, any language that's ever been in the top 5 or so) achieved similar milestones. Rust's adoption is very impressive when you compare it to, say, Haskell or Clojure, but not when you compare it to languages that achieved significant and long-lasting popularity. It's roughly similar to Ada's adoption when it was of a similar age (Ada was more prevalent then than Rust is now in some areas and less so in others). When work on Rust started twenty years ago, Java was younger than Rust is now. It was almost as close in time to the early work on C++ as we are now to the early work on Rust. Larger portions of operating systems were being written in C++ when it was younger than Rust is now.

There's no denying Rust's popularity in open-source CLI dev tools for Python and JS/TS, but when you talk to C/C++ shops who've evaluated Rust and see how many of them end up using it (and to what extent) you see it's not like it's been with languages that ended up achieving real popularity (which includes not only super-popular languages like C, C++, and Java, but also mid-popular languages like Go).

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

#137

Post by solatic »

zozbot234 wrote: post #129
solatic wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To each his own, but while I can certainly understand the hesitancy of an architect to pick Zig for a project that is projected to hit 100k+ lines of code, I really think you're missing out. There is a business case to using Zig today. True in general but in the cloud especially, saving server resources can make a significant impact on the bottom line. There are not nearly enough performance engineers who understand…

> ...in the cloud especially, saving server resources can make a significant impact on the bottom line. There are not nearly enough performance engineers who understand how to take inefficient systems and make improvements to move towards theoretical maximum efficiency. That's a very good point, actually. However... > with fewer footguns ..the Crab People[0] would definitely quibble with that particular claim of your…

Eh, I'd say that Rust has a different set of footguns. You're correct that you won't run into use-after-free footguns, but Rust doesn't protect you from memory leaks, unsafe code is still unsafe, and the borrow checker and Rust's language complexity are their own kind of footguns.

But I digress. I was thinking of Zig in comparison to C when I wrote that. I don't have a problem conceding that point, but I still believe the overall argument is correct to point to Zig specifically in the case of writing code to optimize a hotpath behind FFI; it is much easier to get to more optimal code and cross-compilation is easier to boot (i.e. to support Darwin/AppleSilicon for dev laptops, and both Linux/x64 and Linux/arm64 for cloud servers).

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

#139

Post by grayhatter »

sgt wrote: post #109
flohofwoe wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Rust and Zig really don't overlap much when it comes to target audience. E.g. if you're attracted to Rust, you'll probably find Zig terrible (and the other way around). Rust will also never replace C or C++ in any meaningful way, at best new code gets written in new languages (and Rust being only one among many, and among languages used for new projects will also be C and C++, just maybe not that often). I th…

> I think Rust and Zig really don't overlap much when it comes to target audience. E.g. if you're attracted to Rust, you'll probably find Zig terrible (and the other way around). This is ironic since these two crowds are mostly solving the same type of problems. It's just democrats vs republicans type of split, some of it is just for show and philosophical.

> This is ironic since these two crowds are mostly solving the same type of problems. It's just democrats vs republicans type of split, some of it is just for show and philosophical.

This is a painfully shallow framing.

Yes, programming languages solve problems by emitting instructions that a programmable logic chip can use to preform calculations on input resulting in output. And the scaffolding you use to get there isn't just a matter of philosophical show. Rust as a first order decision will refuse to emit perfectly valid programs because it's unable to prove it's correctness. Zig will emit any program it has enough information to do so. People coding in rust off load much of the effort in understanding and proving that correctness to the compiler. In Zig that relationship is reversed, where the compiler offloads that responsibility to the programmer.

The person you responded to is correct. For some people. Rust solves the difficult and annoying problems, for others it creates difficult and annoying problems.

Some people like creating art, some people like creating software. I guess you could frame that as philosophical, but to call it a political show, belies ignorance to the interactions between systems and predispositions of individuals.

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

#140

Post by kartoffelsaft »

zozbot234 wrote: post #92
small_model wrote: post #78

I like Zig, lots of great features that work in unison. However the worry is by the time it reaches v1 Rust will have consumed the space that C/C++ used to. I think it will be a mainstream language though and gain a lot more traction after v1. There is also the issue of will people actually code by then.

The more compelling scenario is one where the unsafe subset of Rust itself becomes roughly as easy to use as Zig is today, though still with potential challenges wrt. properly interacting with safe code. That requires literally rethinking every language and standard library facility and asking "is this putting up artificial roadblocks or even invoking straight UB when one tries to use it idiomatically in unsafe conte…

The roadblock there is a cultural one. Among Rust devs if you ever find the need for an unsafe block then you need an explanation to back it up. If anything, the Rust language would benefit from adding as much friction to unsafe code as possible, so that you're only going to use it when you actually need it.

In other words, the Rust approach to safety is to make as few unsafe LoC as possible, and the Zig approach is to make every unsafe line as safe as possible. As long as their philosophical approach to safety is such that Zig makes writing unsafe code easy and Rust avoids it as much as possible, then writing unsafe code in Zig will always be easier.

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