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Zig: Build System Reworked

ziglang.org

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Re: Zig: Build System Reworked

#111

Post by jasdfasd8 »

ACCount37 wrote: post #13
portly wrote: post #8

After having used Zig for a couple of months now I am convinced it is a fantastic tool language. You just pick it up to hack some idea together freely. Every time I hit a wall, I find the creators have thought of it already and offers comfort. But nothing gets in your face how to use the programming language "correctly". For me it is now the go-to "tinker in my garage" language.

Is it really that good? My go-to "tinker in my garage" language is Python - lightweight syntax that stays out of your face, batteries included, packages for everything that's not included. What's Zig's edge?

Crazy flexing a gateway programming language that everyone and their chachi knows.

Re: Zig: Build System Reworked

#112

Post by geodel »

NewsaHackO wrote: post #82
ulbu wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

bun seems to be committed to slop rust already. so, with their ethic, maybe we should just disassociate them from zig and let them go realize their slop dreams? zig is on its way to improving compilation times in its own pace and does so for the benefit of the project and everyone involved, so what is left to care for about bun by anthropic’s past?

> bun seems to be committed to slop rust already. so, with their ethic, maybe we should just disassociate them from zig and let them go realize their slop dreams? Closing your eyes and pretending a problem does not exist is the a good solution. The fact of the matter is one of the biggest projects that used Zig thought that the devX was so bad that they opted to rewrite their entire 1M LOC project into a different la…

> The fact of the matter is one of the biggest projects that used Zig thought that the devX was so bad that they opted to rewrite their entire 1M LOC project into a different language.

That is not the fact of matter. The fact is it got bought by Anthropic. And in larger scheme of things Bun is one example Claude capabilities of translation. And even if doesn't work, it just a part of Claude desktop stack so still have millions of installs.

Re: Zig: Build System Reworked

#113

Post by wffurr »

dmit wrote: post #7
epolanski wrote: post #5

This sounds like great news, Zig's compilation times are already terrific and this is going to only make them better.

> Zig's compilation times are already terrific In my experience, this (for now) is mostly aspirational. It's obviously a major goal, and there are clear milestones outlined on how to achieve it, but in practice the initial compile of an empty project or the excruciating pause when you `direnv allow` and ZLS needs to be (re)built are not what I'd describe as "terrific".

Compared to Rust or C++?

Re: Zig: Build System Reworked

#114

Post by nusaru »

IshKebab wrote: post #47

Zig has so many compelling features, and I'd even be willing to give up Rust's near-perfect memory safety in some cases. But the one thing that really put me off is string handling. It's just so super tedious. I like being able to finely manage individual string memory allocations, but I really don't want to have to do it all the time . RAII is great; I wish they'd use some light (optional) RAII for strings and conta…

Why not use an arena allocator?

Re: Zig: Build System Reworked

#115

Post by kllrnohj »

NewsaHackO wrote: post #82
ulbu wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

bun seems to be committed to slop rust already. so, with their ethic, maybe we should just disassociate them from zig and let them go realize their slop dreams? zig is on its way to improving compilation times in its own pace and does so for the benefit of the project and everyone involved, so what is left to care for about bun by anthropic’s past?

> bun seems to be committed to slop rust already. so, with their ethic, maybe we should just disassociate them from zig and let them go realize their slop dreams? Closing your eyes and pretending a problem does not exist is the a good solution. The fact of the matter is one of the biggest projects that used Zig thought that the devX was so bad that they opted to rewrite their entire 1M LOC project into a different la…

> The fact of the matter is one of the biggest projects that used Zig thought that the devX was so bad

It's unlikely to be just a devex issue. The fact of the matter is that a memory unsafe language is an extremely tough sell today, and companies that have a security team at all have likely already made or are planning on making policies like https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/docs...

There's a reason "rewrite it in Rust" was a meme long before LLM coding tools or this Bun drama. With AI accelerated fuzzing techniques and similar, memory safety is rapidly going to become a basic requirement of anything run in a production environment.

Re: Zig: Build System Reworked

#116

Post by conorbergin »

dmit wrote: post #18
ACCount37 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it really that good? My go-to "tinker in my garage" language is Python - lightweight syntax that stays out of your face, batteries included, packages for everything that's not included. What's Zig's edge?

Have you ever thought "Ugh, this bit of Python code is running much slower than I expected on my computer. Wonder if anyone has written a native library for this"? That's probably the closest use case for someone who matches your description -- a language that is much more ergonomic, much more 'modern' feeling (in all the good ways), while still extremely compatible with C. As for the language itself, it's going to b…

I don't think performance has got much to do with tinkering. IMO the real benefit of Zig is you get the flexibility of C with the ergonomics of a modern language.

I like Python as a tool language, and I am very impressed by projects like Micropython, but you always eventually run into a wall. I.e. you are never going to write a compute shader in python, but I assume someone is going to try.

I think the programmer should meet the hardware in the middle, and Python has a few too many layers of indirection to do this well.

Re: Zig: Build System Reworked

#118

Post by 3836293648 »

kibwen wrote: post #107
pmarreck wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that’s not what the benchmarks say about Go, and based on multiple reports, Rust does not scale well into large codebases, which eventually become brittle and very difficult to change Zig is a return to “no magical effects,” except with reasonable safety

[flagged]

You are entirely right here, you're also incredibly rude. Please don't bother replying when the only thing you're actually doing is being condescending and spreading negativity

Re: Zig: Build System Reworked

#119

Post by Philpax »

pmarreck wrote: post #86
miki123211 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if you really need more performance (or, more often, fast startup times), Go gives you 90% of the speed with 30% of the effort. Rust if you really want to squeeze everything that can possibly be squeezed of that CPU.

that’s not what the benchmarks say about Go, and based on multiple reports, Rust does not scale well into large codebases, which eventually become brittle and very difficult to change Zig is a return to “no magical effects,” except with reasonable safety

I would be very surprised to see a large Rust codebase being harder to maintain than a large Zig codebase. The former makes it much easier to maintain invariants at scale.

Re: Zig: Build System Reworked

#120

Post by wmedrano »

miki123211 wrote: post #40
ACCount37 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rarely. Most tinkering tasks just don't have enough heavy duty computation in them to as much as strain a modern CPU. And most of the rest are covered by packages like numpy or pytorch. For the rare exceptions, I make a C lib and call into it to get my numbers crunched. I get that Zig is a viable replacement for C there. But I don't see it replacing Python.

And if you really need more performance (or, more often, fast startup times), Go gives you 90% of the speed with 30% of the effort. Rust if you really want to squeeze everything that can possibly be squeezed of that CPU.

Zig gives you more control than Rust, which should theoretically lead to a higher performance ceiling.

There's not much magic in Zig. Keep hitting goto-definition and you can eventually see the OS switch statements and syscalls.

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