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Zig – SPIR-V Backend Progress

ziglang.org

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Re: Zig – SPIR-V Backend Progress

#11

Post by austin-schick »

laszlojamf wrote: post #3

I really love everything about zig except the language itself. The governance, the culture, all of it seem really cool, but reading https://ziglang.org/learn/why_zig_rust_d_cpp/ I still don't get _why_ I would use it. To an untrained eye, it seems like go, but with manual allocation. Or an imperative-only rust. Like it has some features of all the languages it competes with, but not the ones that would make me reach…

I think this blog post has a great description of the "Modern C" niche Zig fills: https://vfoley.xyz/hare/. I tend to think of Zig in this way. If you found yourself reaching for C, you could instead reach for Zig. You'd get optionals instead of null pointers, comptime instead of macros, a real facility for handling errors, etc. It's like C but with some of the sharp edges sanded off.

Re: Zig – SPIR-V Backend Progress

#12

Post by dnautics »

weitzj wrote: post #10

Side question as I am following zig only losely and do Go Programming: Zig has the feature that you can drop in your allocator from the caller. Now with 0.16 you also "bring your own IO" implementation with you. And for my understanding this looks like the pattern Go uses with its Context package, where you pass in transitive data, cancellation signals and timers to for example stop an SQL query in server B, since a…

not really sure what you're asking. but time is now part of the io interface, so you can pretty easily write your own io implementation that just stubs out to the stdlib's default io content and has custom time functions if you want to try something funky. This is pretty close to what you are asking for (and in terms of functionality, equivalent). I say go for it and see what happens, report back!

Re: Zig – SPIR-V Backend Progress

#13

Post by [deleted] »

laszlojamf wrote: post #3

I really love everything about zig except the language itself. The governance, the culture, all of it seem really cool, but reading https://ziglang.org/learn/why_zig_rust_d_cpp/ I still don't get _why_ I would use it. To an untrained eye, it seems like go, but with manual allocation. Or an imperative-only rust. Like it has some features of all the languages it competes with, but not the ones that would make me reach…

[deleted]

Re: Zig – SPIR-V Backend Progress

#15

Post by dnautics »

laszlojamf wrote: post #3

I really love everything about zig except the language itself. The governance, the culture, all of it seem really cool, but reading https://ziglang.org/learn/why_zig_rust_d_cpp/ I still don't get _why_ I would use it. To an untrained eye, it seems like go, but with manual allocation. Or an imperative-only rust. Like it has some features of all the languages it competes with, but not the ones that would make me reach…

> What do people use zig for, and why zig and not one of the others?

I'm the maintainer of zigler (https://zigler.hexdocs.pm/Zig.html), and I have my own pharma startup. I currently use zig in two contexts:

1) wraps a proprietary .so file that is used to communicate with a scientific (microscope) digital camera, in a nice BEAM-module-shaped interface. Sorry, code is private.

2) I have a vue.js component that does DNA editing, and one of the features is DNA sequence alignment, and so I had claude write the smith-waterman lalign algorithm in zig, and it compiles to wasm, and this plus going from O(N^2) to O(N) dropped the runtime of an alignment from 30s to a few hundred ms, in both cases so much better than ~5m using a web SAAS, good enough that I can render alignments on-demand, and I don't have to do a storage layer for alignments.

https://github.com/Vidala-Labs/opengenepool/tree/master/src/...

you can play with it at:

https://opengenepool.vidalalabs.com

Two sequences may be aligned by right-clicking a sequence name when a sequence is loaded, it will align the two sequences (you'll have to create a second sequence as it forbids aligning a sequence with itself).

Why zig? Because it just makes things like cross-compilation easier (microscope is mounted on a elixir nerves deployment!), and has less footguns, and doesn't hide away things you might care about. Most of the things i build with zig don't really have a concern about memory safety, or have such trivial memory patterns that it's easy to verify by eye that they're memory safe.

Re: Zig – SPIR-V Backend Progress

#16

Post by applfanboysbgon »

laszlojamf wrote: post #3

I really love everything about zig except the language itself. The governance, the culture, all of it seem really cool, but reading https://ziglang.org/learn/why_zig_rust_d_cpp/ I still don't get _why_ I would use it. To an untrained eye, it seems like go, but with manual allocation. Or an imperative-only rust. Like it has some features of all the languages it competes with, but not the ones that would make me reach…

C is over 50 years old, but it is still more or less the lingua franca of computing. The world benefits from having "C with some improvements from 50 years of learning". The world also benefits from having featureful languages that are a huge divergence from C, but it also just needs a language that provides a thin cross-hardware abstraction over the asm layer and some conveniences over writing raw asm. We don't need every language to be massively featureful, and we hopefully won't all have to reach for C for the rest of human civilization when we need a language that isn't massively featureful.

Re: Zig – SPIR-V Backend Progress

#17

Post by auraham »

dnautics wrote: post #15
laszlojamf wrote: post #3

I really love everything about zig except the language itself. The governance, the culture, all of it seem really cool, but reading https://ziglang.org/learn/why_zig_rust_d_cpp/ I still don't get _why_ I would use it. To an untrained eye, it seems like go, but with manual allocation. Or an imperative-only rust. Like it has some features of all the languages it competes with, but not the ones that would make me reach…

> What do people use zig for, and why zig and not one of the others? I'm the maintainer of zigler ( https://zigler.hexdocs.pm/Zig.html ), and I have my own pharma startup. I currently use zig in two contexts: 1) wraps a proprietary .so file that is used to communicate with a scientific (microscope) digital camera, in a nice BEAM-module-shaped interface. Sorry, code is private. 2) I have a vue.js component that does D…

Can you give more details about using zig along with elixir?

> microscope is mounted on a elixir nerves deployment!

What do you mean? I imagine that there is an Elixir application running on an embedded system and maybe it relies on an external binary application (compiled using zig). If so, how do you manage the communication between them?

Re: Zig – SPIR-V Backend Progress

#19

Post by auraham »

laszlojamf wrote: post #3

I really love everything about zig except the language itself. The governance, the culture, all of it seem really cool, but reading https://ziglang.org/learn/why_zig_rust_d_cpp/ I still don't get _why_ I would use it. To an untrained eye, it seems like go, but with manual allocation. Or an imperative-only rust. Like it has some features of all the languages it competes with, but not the ones that would make me reach…

I have the same feeling about Zig. In this interview [1], Andrew Kelley, creator of Zig, explains a lot of the features of the language; compares it against c, rust, go; and explains why he created the language. According to him, the killer feature of zig is the tool chain (compiler, linker, build system) since it has no dependencies. So, it will work in any OS/target you choose.

It is a really interesting interview. However, Zig code is a bit hard for me to read.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqddnwKF8HQ&t=10s

Re: Zig – SPIR-V Backend Progress

#20

Post by audunw »

laszlojamf wrote: post #3

I really love everything about zig except the language itself. The governance, the culture, all of it seem really cool, but reading https://ziglang.org/learn/why_zig_rust_d_cpp/ I still don't get _why_ I would use it. To an untrained eye, it seems like go, but with manual allocation. Or an imperative-only rust. Like it has some features of all the languages it competes with, but not the ones that would make me reach…

I really think the best way to describe it is an attempt to replace C.

Go is only like C in that it's simple. But it's clearly not a direct C replacement. It's not a great language for writing an OS or embedded code.

Rust may replace C in many contexts, but Rust is much more like C++. It adds a lot of complexity to the language and the compiler. I think it does it in a much better way than C++ so I think it is more likely to replace C in certain contexts where C++ did not replace C.

But Zig really is a much more direct replacement for C. It's aiming at the same niche, but in a different way. And considering how much C still dominates systems programming, it should be pretty clear that if Zig succeeds in become a good replacement, the answer to your question is: you'd reach for it whenever you'd have reached for C before.

The only question at this time is if Rust will eat so much into that niche that what's left for Zig becomes too small. Though it could go the other way. Zig is simpler and easier, and you can iterate really quickly with it. There's even incremental compilation now. I suspect tests with debug allocators, the integrated fuzzing, static analysis and LLM assisted reviews, can make Zig just as safe as Rust in practice, with far less complexity. So maybe Zig will eat into Rusts niche (whenever Zig is mature, right now it's going the other way as seen with Bun)

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