Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

ziglang.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 315 posts

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

#191

Post by pjmlp »

hxtk wrote: post #97
jauntywundrkind wrote: post #66

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…

It’s surprising to me how much people seem to want async in low level languages. Async is very nice in Go, but the reason I reach for a language like Zig is to explicitly control those things. I’m happily writing a Zig project right now using libxev as my io_uring abstraction.

Using async in low level languages goes all the way back to the 1960's, became common in systems languages like Solo Pascal, Modula-2, with Dr.Dobbs and The C/C++ User's Journal having plenty of articles regarding C extensions for similar purposes.

Hardly anything radical.

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

#192

Post by pjmlp »

Quothling wrote: post #161
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.

Zig is a drop-in for C. I'm not sure what Rust is but around here no C++ teams seem to be adopting it. Zig on the other hand is seeing adoption in teams who write C for Python binaries. Not a whole lot of it since it's not exactly safe or "stable", but some. Now I'm aware that things like UV are build with Rust, but part of why UV is adopted so widely isn't just that it's fast. It's that it is a drop-in for pip, so t…

I guess C++ teams at Microsoft, Google, IBM, Adobe don't count.

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

#193

Post by pjmlp »

pmarreck wrote: post #113
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.

That won't happen if there are legitimate reasons why both Mitchell Hashimoto (creator of Ghostty etc.) and Richard Feldman (of Elm fame, creator of Roc-lang) chose Zig over Rust for their work. They both blogged about it https://tomas-svojanovsky.medium.com/mitchell-hashimoto-go-a... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJ5-41u-e7k https://weeklyrust.substack.com/p/why-roc-is-moving-away-fro... Perhaps there is room for…

That doesn't mean Microsoft, Google, Apple, Sony, Nintendo, AMD, Intel, NVidia will be jumping into Zig any time now, just because some HN celebrities blogged about it.

Those are the companies I care about when chosing which programing languages to invest my time on.

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

#194

Post by epolanski »

flohofwoe wrote: post #93
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…

IME Zig's breaking changes are quite manageable for a lot of application types since most of the breakage these days happens in the stdlib and not in the language. And if you just want do read and write files, the highlevel file-io interfaces are nearly identical, they just moved to a different namespace and now require a std.Io pointer to be passed in. And tbh, I take a 'living' language any day over a language that…

Sure, but considering that Zig is a modern C alternative, one should not and cannot afford to forget that C has been successful also because it stayed small and consistent for so long.

The entire C, C ABI and standard lib specs, combined, are probably less words than the Promise spec from ECMAScript 262.

A small language that stays consistent and predictable lets developers evolve it in best practices, patterns, design choices, tooling. C has achieved all that.

No evolving language has anywhere near that freedom.

I don't want an ever evolving Zig too for what is worth. And I like Zig.

I don't think any developer can resolve all of the design tensions a programming language has, you can't make it ergonomic on its own.

But a small, modern, stable C would still be welcome, besides Odin.

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

#195

Post by LexiMax »

pjmlp wrote: post #188
zozbot234 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately editions don't allow breaking changes in the standard library, because Rust codes written in different "editions" must be allowed to interoperate freely even within a single build. The resulting constraint is roughly similar to that of never ever breaking ABI in C++.

Compiler vendors are free to chose what ABI stability their C++ implementations provide. ISO C++ standard is silent on how the ABI actually looks like, the ABI not being broken in most C and C++ compilers is a consequence of customers of those compilers not being happy about breakages.

> Compiler vendors are free to chose what ABI stability their C++ implementations provide.

In theory. In practice the standards committee, consisting of compiler vendors and some of their users, shape the standard, and thus the standard just so happens to conspire to avoid ABI breakages.

This is in part why Google bowed out of C++ standardization years ago.

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

#196

Post by epolanski »

jauntywundrkind wrote: post #66

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…

I am also positive, but when is the language going to hit a stable very LTS version that won't be touched for a long time?

If you want to compete with C, you can't do so without understanding that its stability and the developers focusing on mastering its practices, design, limitations, tooling has been one of the major successes.

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

#197

Post by pjmlp »

ceteia wrote: post #159
kartoffelsaft wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The GitHub project has some activity at least, and they might be coming with some announcement later this year. https://github.com/carbon-language/carbon-lang/

There is an announcement already planned at NDC Toronto 2026.

> Carbon: graduating from the experiment

https://ndctoronto.com/agenda/carbon-graduating-from-the-exp...

As for it being widely adopted, people keeping missing the point that Carbon is mostly for Google themselves, as means to integrate into existing C++ projects.

They are the very first ones to assert that for green field projects there are already plenty of safe languages to chose from.

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

#198

Post by LexiMax »

junon wrote: post #178
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…

> Rust will also never replace C or C++ in any meaningful way Not only do I disagree it never will, I think it's already well on its way to doing exactly that.

C? Never. I feel like that ship has sailed, it's too primordial and tied to too many system ABI's to ever truly go away. I think we'll see a lot of Rust or Zig replacing certain popular C programs and libraries, but I don't think C will ever go away.

C++ on the other hand? Possibly, though I think that it's just as much because of the own-goals of the C++ standards committee as it is the successes of Rust. I don't really consider Zig a competitor in this space because if you're reaching for C++, you are reaching for a level of abstraction that Zig is unwilling to provide.

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

#199

Post by kibwen »

pjmlp wrote: post #190
kibwen wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The resulting constraint is roughly similar to that of never ever breaking ABI in C++. No, not even remotely. ABI-stability in C++ means that C++ is stuck with suboptimal implementations of stdlib functions, whereas Rust only stabilizes the exposed interface without stabilizing implementation details. > Unfortunately editions don't allow breaking changes in the standard library Surprisingly, this isn't true in prac…

Only because Rust is a source only language for distribution. One business domain that Rust currently doesn't have an answer for, is selling commercial SDKs with binary libraries, which is exactly the kind of customers that get pissed off when C and C++ compilers break ABIs. Microsoft mentions this in the adoption issues they are having with Rust, see talks from Victor Ciura, and while they can work around this with…

I'm not expecting to convince you of this position, but I find it to be a feature, not a bug, that Rust is inherently hostile to companies whose business models rely on tossing closed-source proprietary blobs over the wall. I'm fairly certain that Andrew Kelley would say the same thing about Zig. Give me the source or GTFO.

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

#200

Post by pstuart »

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…

People might be triggered by the word "worthless" but I totally get your point.

I hear great things about the language but only have so many hours in the day and so many usable neurons to spend in that day. Someday it would be nice to play with it.

The easiest way to embrace any new language is to have a compelling use to use it. I've not hit that point yet.

Post reply on HN