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Zig: Build System Reworked

ziglang.org

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Re: Zig: Build System Reworked

#141

Post by DetroitThrow »

sourcegrift wrote: post #96

Would someone tell a rust user why they should and should not try zig?

Not working within the bounds of lifetimes, and more ecosystem that doesn't live in the world of lifetimes, gives Zig some of the wonderful dev ergonomics of Rust while making it easier to prototype.

For small, short game dev, or even smaller embedded projects, this ends up being a wonderful way to live as often times you're trying to eke out performance in ways that would require breaking out of whatever type abstractions or using unsafe.

For long-lived systems, for systems that need to have lots of people with various skill levels work on them, for a mature ecosystem, for a language/standard library with stability... You probably don't want to pick Zig right now. Some of these points will change over time with Zig becoming more mature, some won't. Zig will always be super cool to build things in.

As far as most low-level programmers not liking Rust like some other commenters say, lol, lmao even.

Re: Zig: Build System Reworked

#142

Post by dmit »

pron wrote: post #140
dmit wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

.....Did you just complain about Rust's "lower adoption" compared to C++, immediately following it by "Zig, on the other hand :eyes_emoji:"

No. I "complained" that Rust is too similar to C++ (which for some is the attraction, and for others not so much) while Zig isn't.

Apologies, I meant your comment pre-edit(s).

Re: Zig: Build System Reworked

#144

Post by nullpoint420 »

ulbu wrote: post #42
brabel wrote: post #24

I just upgraded some code to Zig 0.16.0 and I am actually really happy with the results. It impacted A LOT of things, but the changes were actually very good and seems to have set the language for a bright future, especially with the new IO mechanism which allows supper efficient code that looks good whether it's implemented single-threaded, multi-threaded or just via an event loop! If you haven't tried Zig since 0.1…

the “(super) efficient” is not there yet. Io is still dynamic dispatch with multiple layers of indirection. afaik it’s slower than before. the upcoming releases are expected to provide a solution to this “dispatch is comptime-known, but still dynamic” problem, and drop the loses in efficiency.

Wow that’s gnarly it’s using dynamic dispatch. I mean I get it, but I thought zig was some sort of performance demon.

Re: Zig: Build System Reworked

#145

Post by DetroitThrow »

magnio wrote: post #103
bbkane wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thank Go for this. Go's compilation times seemed to inspire other language devs

I doubt Go has any sizable effect on the community of programming language developers. Probably Pascal has more impact on this.

Pascal has a lot of influence on this, but Go as well! My PL friends often talk about Go's benefits and flaws when thinking about advancing other their own projects or improving the mainstream languages they work on.

Re: Zig: Build System Reworked

#147

Post by FpUser »

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?

I once had to write software that would go through whole bunch of PHP code (more than 5000 files), parse / discover certain patterns and write report with proposed fixes or same but with the fixes applied.

For whatever reasons I had to do it in Python. It was total nightmare to debug as the execution speed in debug mode was insanely slow.

I could've written it in C++ in exactly the same time and not to have any of the performance problems.

Re: Zig: Build System Reworked

#148

Post by epolanski »

ozgrakkurt wrote: post #133
ozgrakkurt wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just creating a file with dummy test like if (2 * 2 != 5) { @panic("fail"); } And running `zig test file.zig -OReleaseSafe` takes a couple seconds on my computer. It also keeps taking the same amount of time every time I do it when I modify that file. Using 0.16 (or master) version so my toolchain isn't old and I'm on linux. Zig is super nice to use as a language but the compiler/stdlib isn't developed conservatively…

Also another point. I have some zig projects from couple of months back and they all have build.zig/build.zig.zon. I tried to copy that to the new dummy project I did and of course the API changed and that is broken now (just 15 lines of build.zig code). This kind of thing just feels unacceptable considering I don't really see ANY improvement on the issues I had from back then. Also had a similar baffling experience…

To be fair the language is in beta and breaking changes are expected.

Re: Zig: Build System Reworked

#149

Post by Decabytes »

There is an idea I've been kicking around for a long time, which I'll just call dual programming. The idea is to develop a stack that consists of just two programming languages, 1 higher level language, and one lower level language. You are supposed to do as much programming as you can in the high level language, and only drop into the low level language as needed. The problem is that unless you already know a low level programming language really well, you'll most likely have to re familiarize yourself with the language before doing the low level stuff.

This makes Cpp and Rust harder to use then say C, so C becomes the default for me. But C is not without its issues of which we are aware. But Zig feels like it could fill that sweet spot really well, being simple enough that it's easier to pick up after a long break, but still coming with a lot of modern tooling that makes programming easier.

Re: Zig: Build System Reworked

#150

Post by peesem »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #126

> We’ll be releasing 0.17.0 within a couple weeks from now. This is amazing. Didn't 0.16 take >1 year? I was not expecting such a fast 0.17 release, but am very pleased to find this out today.

mainly because this build system change, along with upgrading to LLVM 22, are the only major changes for 0.17.0: https://ziglang.org/download/0.16.0/release-notes.html#Roadm...
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