The adjective 'useful' is doing a lot of the heavy-lifting here.
What kind of 'useful'? Normative? Empirical? Prescriptive? Pragmatic?
'Useful' is a very subjective north star.
My Software North Star
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Re: My Software North Star
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It doesn’t matter that the language you use is memory-safe > nobody can trick me into mistaking lesser stars for my true destination The author seems to be in some level of denial around compile-time safety checks. They're right that runtime safety errors are an issue, but it feels wrong to discount compile time checkers when it can save a lot of yak shaving.
Quote the entire sentence. >It doesn’t matter that the language you use is memory-safe, if you didn’t design for correctness or have no process that will eventually lead you to fixing all bugs. It's also worth noting that they linked a post about how memory safety is literally a matter of life and death, so it seems like their point is that memory safety is one class of bug, and a compiler guarantee about it doesn't…
That is correct, this blog post is about understanding the priority of various subgoals and the ultimate goal (creating useful software). Memory-safety is important but overfitting on that subgoal, as I believe the memory-safety blog post is doing, won't make you create better software.
If Rust helps you get all the way to correctness, then great, but that blog post was insane.
Re: My Software North Star
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
oh I don't particularly care I'm just asking what is it about this article that is so worthy of being front page? I'm literally just calling out the content. I'm sorry for complaining.
It’s getting attention because the subtext of the article is the zig vs AI ideological battle going on (and zig vs Rust somewhat on the backburner) Recent events AFAIU: - bun (bought by big AI) switching to Rust - zig team banning AI pull requests (because they want to review humans) - The cloud industry buying all coding tooling companies (uv, vite, bun) but zig being unbuyable If anybody from the zig core team is r…
so im just getting caught up with zig is I have never really paid attention to it
so far I'm not really getting zig and I see they banned AI ? seems like that is just going to attract anti-AI user base...not sure if that was a wise decision.
also not really sure why anyone would migrate from Rust to Zig, it seems much less mature and unsure of the ROI there.
Re: My Software North Star
#24I imagine it's a difficult time to be a Zig developer. In the near term, Bun choosing to switch from Zig to Rust specifically to fix all the memory errors seems to have done the Zig community some psychological damage. But more significantly, in the medium term it looks likely that AI coding is going to overtake the industry before Zig gets properly established. And it is going to be very hard to justify choosing Zig…
1. Fixing memory errors wasn't the reason the project migrated to Zig, but a beef between the Bun maintainer not getting his own changes in the upstream compiler and the Bun's new employer focus on Rust.
2. You can write memory safe code in C (Redis, SQLite, OpenBSD, Git, etc), let alone in Zig which provides more tools to write memory safe code.
3. AI can write very good Zig already. This isn't 2024 anymore where "the LLM has seen lots of this language so will write better in this language" scenario existed. Will make you an example: I have worked in a very esoteric typescript fork called TS plus (providing among others fluent style apis for pipe-able functions) and even Opus 4.1 did well. Recently I have forked the Elm language and the LLM had no problem dealing with it, despite significant differences to the original Elm.
4. Zig's community uses Zig because it likes Zig and its tooling and doesn't like the constraints of other languages. Simple as that.
Re: My Software North Star
#25I imagine it's a difficult time to be a Zig developer. In the near term, Bun choosing to switch from Zig to Rust specifically to fix all the memory errors seems to have done the Zig community some psychological damage. But more significantly, in the medium term it looks likely that AI coding is going to overtake the industry before Zig gets properly established. And it is going to be very hard to justify choosing Zig…
Agreed unfortunately, if Zigs whole selling point is meant to be a "nicer C" (and a much nicer DX than Rust because no fighting the borrow checker etc) - does that really matter in a world where an LLM is writing the code? I am not going to be fighting the borrow checker, the LLM is.
And as always, the response you'll hear is: but AI sucks/hallucinates/could never replace me etc... Just look at the progress LLM'S have made in the past few years, and extrapolate that to the next 10 or 20 years. I don't see how Zig makes sense if this is the trajectory the industry is going.
Re: My Software North Star
#26I imagine it's a difficult time to be a Zig developer. In the near term, Bun choosing to switch from Zig to Rust specifically to fix all the memory errors seems to have done the Zig community some psychological damage. But more significantly, in the medium term it looks likely that AI coding is going to overtake the industry before Zig gets properly established. And it is going to be very hard to justify choosing Zig…
1. Fixing memory errors wasn't the reason the project migrated to Zig, but a beef between the Bun maintainer not getting his own changes in the upstream compiler and the Bun's new employer focus on Rust. 2. You can write memory safe code in C (Redis, SQLite, OpenBSD, Git, etc), let alone in Zig which provides more tools to write memory safe code. 3. AI can write very good Zig already. This isn't 2024 anymore where "t…
Believe what you want, I guess.
https://xcancel.com/jarredsumner/status/2055796104302858694#...
> I’m just tired of dealing with crashes and memory leaks & want language features to help prevent things
(Edit: this reply seemed less flippant before the parent edited their reply)
Re: My Software North Star
#27I imagine it's a difficult time to be a Zig developer. In the near term, Bun choosing to switch from Zig to Rust specifically to fix all the memory errors seems to have done the Zig community some psychological damage. But more significantly, in the medium term it looks likely that AI coding is going to overtake the industry before Zig gets properly established. And it is going to be very hard to justify choosing Zig…
> In the near term, Bun choosing to switch from Zig to Rust specifically to fix all the memory errors seems to have done the Zig community some psychological damage. Meanwhile, some projects are doing the opposite, like going from Rust to Zig, here's an example from a podcast I recently listened to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSXGf3oN2yU Here's the project in question: https://github.com/roc-lang/roc I think Bun…
I wish Roclang well but (as a regular listener to Feldman's podcast) I don't think we can draw many conclusions from this switch other than "Feldman has lots of opinions on lots of things".
Re: My Software North Star
#28I imagine it's a difficult time to be a Zig developer. In the near term, Bun choosing to switch from Zig to Rust specifically to fix all the memory errors seems to have done the Zig community some psychological damage. But more significantly, in the medium term it looks likely that AI coding is going to overtake the industry before Zig gets properly established. And it is going to be very hard to justify choosing Zig…
> I imagine it's a difficult time to be a Zig developer.
In some ways it always has been, the community was 'born' in the middle of the pandemic, then for a long time there was a constant influx of Rust zealots coming into threads about Zig to remark how immoral it is to use Zig, and now LLM shovel sellers are telling everybody that the only way forward is to become efficient at consuming tokens.
But it's actually not that bad.
The Zig community is growing pretty well, useful software is being written in Zig, and the advantages that Zig brings are still valid whether you hand-code or use LLMs (e.g. cross-compilation of C/C++ code).
Re: My Software North Star
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
1. Fixing memory errors wasn't the reason the project migrated to Zig, but a beef between the Bun maintainer not getting his own changes in the upstream compiler and the Bun's new employer focus on Rust. 2. You can write memory safe code in C (Redis, SQLite, OpenBSD, Git, etc), let alone in Zig which provides more tools to write memory safe code. 3. AI can write very good Zig already. This isn't 2024 anymore where "t…
Believe what you want, I guess. https://xcancel.com/jarredsumner/status/2055796104302858694#... > I’m just tired of dealing with crashes and memory leaks & want language features to help prevent things (Edit: this reply seemed less flippant before the parent edited their reply)
The truth is a bit of everything, bun being a messy codebase written primarily with "move fast and break things" in mind, cultural divergence between Bun and the Zig community, and also hiring issues. People maybe forgot but Jarred at some point caused a bunch of drama when he tweeted that working at Bun is not for people that value life/work balance, which went viral and caused an uproar. Must not have been super easy to hire from the Zig community after that, and in fact once Bun got acquired by Anthropic, it was pretty much Jarred and Claude doing all the work on the codebase. Pivoting to Rust is probably at least in part a way to reset the clock on those hiring interactions.
Re: My Software North Star
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't get it. Are we reading the same article? This article is so generic that it reads like vacuous truth to me. But I don't see their bitterness towards Rust (or anything, really. It's just vacuous.) from it. Is this person a famous anti-rust'er or something?
It's so bland and generic its bizarre like somebody is botting it. Weird that all the comments calling this out are getting flagged or downvoted.
I think you will be surprised by how many developers do not have this same list of priorities (or in that order) when developing software.
I posted this link at the same time when I posted it to Lobsters (https://lobste.rs/s/g6lkw1/my_software_north_star) 3 days ago, but it didn't get on the front page. Seeing that the submission time has been reset, I imagine it was given a second chance by HN curators (it's a known process), but that doesn't mean free upvotes, it's just that some people resonate with the thinking.