Earlier quoted context omitted.
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I actually don’t work for the PSF, and have never received any money from the PSF. Thank you for imputing bias into my motives rather than responding to the comment, though.
Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke
161–170 of 862 posts
Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke
#162I think Zig being a new and a low-resource language (not enough training data) is also one of the reasons Bun decided to use Rust as large language models will simply not be as good no matter how good the model is.
My experience was that LLMs performed at Zig and Rust at about the same level? That is: worse than at something like JS or C or Python, but well enough to write code that works. And they only got better since I first tried them.
Intuitively, Rust would perform worse because ownership is a different paradigm, while Zig is far more similar to things like C/C++. But I guess that's canceled out by the disparity in the language resource base.
Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke
#163There's so much good stuff in this post. Can't help to think of a recent HN post about most AI-generated projects being abandoned within months. Why? Because value of a project is not in the code produced. It's in the amount of battle-testing that code has seen. Battle-tested, mature code > fresh rewrite. Existing Zig codebase has seen X amount of battle-testing. Rust rewrite: 0 (except -I'm assuming- passing test su…
But it’s really the same old problem we’ve seen for decades. Developers write code. Owners declare victory. Owners rid themselves of expensive opex. Owners sell the division or try to keep the project limping along but all they see is vaguaries from the new cheap guy who they keep telling isn’t good enough for a raise, company hemorrhages money and eventually sells for a song.
They’ve just found a way to explore that logical fallacy even faster.
Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke
#164I'm with Andrew.
It was just a marketing piece. It offered many data and pretty graphics but only that, no way to attest the veracity of it.
Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke
#165I stand with Andrew. As someone who's been following Sumner's work closely for years, Kelley's accusations are very much true even if unkind. While the results are useful and cool, it a wankfluencer op from start to finish. I dare you to refute thus. And I say all this as someone who does agentic development 8hrs a day and someone who always pestered my team to opt for Rust and Deno instead of Node. Call a spade a sp…
> But I'm glad he stayed honest to himself instead and didn't have a PR team ghostwrite his thoughts. If there's one thing I learned in this debacle is "I should spend 1-2 days and send to a close friend before hitting publish on a firey reply." The way Andrew rephrased the closing section is the kind of thing I should publish on the first edit in similar scenarios.
Unlikely a useful lesson here. If it would have been written as "political correct" version up to the point of not calling Jarred out at all would have missed the core message. The fact that it was written blunt is the reason it went viral.
Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke
#166Wow, it's unsafe Rust? That seems... like the worst of all worlds. If nobody knows why the unsafe is required there's no way they'll be able to unwind it. If they can't unwind it then they're in a worse version of C (+ cargo).
Not a lot of it is unsafe, I think they said 4%?
It's practically impossible to write safe Rust when you are calling external libs written in C/C++, like they do for the Javascript engine.
Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then that's their own fault. Nothing to do with Anthropic, it could have been any other company putting out marketing material and people blindly trust them.
I don’t understand the distinction you’re trying to make. Yes, “it could have been any other company”, but it wasn’t, it was this one. Had it been any other company, we’d be talking about that other company; because it was this one, we’re talking about this one.
My point is that the article starts with
> Anthropic is actively campaigning to end software engineering
But that's true only if one believe what they are putting out blindly. Why not just call it a bluff and move on rather than making a mountain out of molehill
Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, exactly. It's weird that Zig even responded to that. Imagining that your studio switched from Unity to Unreal and Unity proceeded to release a hit piece attacking your codebase quality and workplace environment.
If Unity had 2.5 users anyone had heard of before the switch you can see where the motivation might (at least emotionally) come from.
It's not really this though. It's about the user leaving throwing misleading shade. Politely, of course.
Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke
#169Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke
#170Those problems are partly attributable to Zig itself. If the project accepted AI-assisted contributions, this controversy might never have happened. Completely shutting out one side of the industry and taking a dogmatic position is not helpful, especially for a pre-1.0 language that is still relatively immature.
Now the Zig community is attacking one of the largest and best-known codebases ever built with the language. Anthropic’s motives are clearly promotional, but even so, I would not choose Zig for any project.