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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

#201

Post by pjmlp »

pron wrote: post #136
metaltyphoon wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 th…

To this day C++ has hardly won the hearts of C devs on the embedded space, on both sides of the camp there are individuals that start religious discussions about the C/C++ abreviation, there is something like Orthodox C++ that basically means using C++ compiler to write what is mostly Better C, and most frameworks that were so hyped in the 1990's are now gone, or subsyst in maintenance contracts on applications that when the time gets to be rewritten it won't surely be C++.

So even though C++ is the language I reach for outside Java, C#, TypeScript, I would assert that downplaying Rust adoption by Amazon, Adobe, Microsoft, Google, is losing track where things are going.

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

#202

Post by pron »

ceteia wrote: post #182
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…

Rust projects generally use licenses like MIT instead of GPL, and thus some major corporations support Rust a lot, and thus Rust will continue getting popular.

Growing in absolute numbers doesn't mean growing the market share, and even a growing market share is not necessarily sufficiently fast growth to become a safe bet. All languages that ended up becoming very popular grew their market share much faster than Rust does. Being an old language with some real market share is obviously better than being an old language with negligible market share, but being an old language with real, but small, market share is not exactly a sign of confidence.

It's true that the total market share for low level languages (C + C++ + Rust + Zig + others) continues declining, as it has for a couple of decades now (that may change if coding agents start writing everything in C [1] but it's not happening yet), but that's all the more reason to find some "safe bet" within that diminishing total market. Rust's modest success is enough for some, but clearly not enough for many others to be seen as a safe bet.

[1]: https://stephenramsay.net/posts/vibe-coding.html

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

#203

Post by pjmlp »

cies wrote: post #173
flohofwoe wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think Rust is "a better C/C++". It's a new kind of beast. Interesting, but very different. The same can be said about Zig's comptime. It's entirely unlike anything C, C++ or Rust has to offer. > I expect LLMs to be really good at converting C to Zig. While it's possible to translate C to Zig code - and you don't need an LLM for that, it's a Zig compiler/build-system feature - the result will be quite differ…

Zig's comptime is an addition. You don't have to use it. And some C-macros may translate quite cleanly to it. OTOH going from C++ (OO) to Rust (not OO, borrow checker) is a big leap.

Not all C++ is OOP, and Rust does support OOP as per CS literature, so much so that I have had no issues rewriting Raytracing Weekend tutorial from C++ into Rust, while keeping the same OOP architecture from the tutorial.

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

#204

Post by pjmlp »

LexiMax wrote: post #195
pjmlp wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I know, but still go try to push for ABI breaks on Android.

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

#205

Post by pjmlp »

kibwen wrote: post #199
pjmlp wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In the end it is a matter of which industries the Rust community sees as relevant to gain adoption, and which ones the community is happy that Rust will never take off.

Do you know one industry that likes very much tossing closed-source proprietary blobs over the wall?

Game studios, and everyone that works in the games industry providing tooling for AAA studios.

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

#206

Post by giovannibonetti »

sgt wrote: post #177
zozbot234 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 was more referring to the type of things 90% of the developers are likely to build. In most cases that'll be command line tools, libraries or API's.

That's the space where Go shines

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

#207

Post by pron »

metaltyphoon wrote: post #154
pron wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

> Very much so once you compare it to how quickly C++ C++ came out in 1985 and competed with C, COBOL, Pascal and FORTRAN. It was an overall improvement than those and therefore there is a legit reason for it to take off. > 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 I assume many places that have a huge codebase in C++ w…

> It was an overall improvement than those and therefore there is a legit reason for it to take off.

Of course. The rate of adoption is related to the increase in value compared to the status quo, much like how genes spread. But Rust's adoption is slow precisely because its "fitness benefit" is low.

> That would almost always cause problems but for greenfield projects it's a no brainer IMO.

It would have been a no brainer if, when writing a new codebase expected to last 20 years or more (which is often the case with software written in low-level languages), you'd believe the chosen language to be very popular over the next few deacdes. But given its slow adoption compared to languages that ended up achieving that status, despite it's rather old age, it's not looking like a safe bet, which is why Rust's adoption for important greenfield projects is also low (again, relative to other languages).

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

#208

Post by hxtk »

pjmlp wrote: post #191
hxtk wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When I look at historical cases, it seems different from a case today. If I’m a programmer in the 60s wanting async in my “low level language,” what I actually want is to make some of the highest level languages available at the time even more high level in their IO abstractions. As I understand it, C was a high-level language when it was invented, as opposed to assembly with macros. People wanting to add async were extending the state of the art for high level abstraction.

A language doing it today is doing it in the context of an ecosystem where even higher level languages exist and they have made the choice to target a lower level of abstraction.

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

#209

Post by ceteia »

pjmlp wrote: post #197
ceteia wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What concerns me is that the design of Carbon in aspects seem to have serious issues already now.

In case that you are well familiar with for instance pattern matching, might you have any opinions on the pattern matching that is currently proposed for Carbon?

https://docs.carbon-lang.dev/docs/design/pattern_matching.ht...

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

#210

Post by derefr »

portly wrote: post #189

As always with Zig posts, here come the haters. I really wonder why you even care about it. Can't we all be happy that Andrew and his team are doing their damnest to create something they believe in? Myself I am deeply inspired by their engineering spirit. In other posts I see people "worry" that Zig might not become mainstream. Why do people worry about these things? Just use the language if it helps you solve your…

A mainstream language has predictable library-ecosystem support for most use-cases.
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