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Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

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Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#181

Post by p-e-w »

petcat wrote: post #133
RetroTechie wrote: post #97

There'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…

> Now if that's further migrated to safe Rust, put into production & gathered feedback from lots of users, yes then you have something. Obviously they have to start somewhere if they want to get to safe rust with a considerable degree of battle testing. So they decided to start with just a transliteration and go from there. I think the Zig people are really just concerned that maybe Zig itself is a DOA language becau…

> I think the Zig people are really just concerned that maybe Zig itself is a DOA language because it doesn't offer enough over C for any serious use and their flagship project has now abandoned it.

You hit the nail on the head there. Zig is 10 years old now and it’s pretty clear that the industry isn’t biting, compared to the behemoth that is Rust. Between Rust, C, and C++ there is very little room for another language with a woefully incomplete library ecosystem to establish itself.

A true competitor would need to offer genuine extra value, such as dependent types or other formal verification features, to carve out a niche.

Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#182

Post by jeremyjh »

cropcirclbureau wrote: post #55

I 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…

It was poorly justified up-front but frankly I did not need the examples to understand Jarred’s frustration.

What I found helpful were his explanation of how the interaction with JavaScript’s garbage collector created unique challenges for Bun. Andrew did not address this point at all. It was also helpful to understand how the test suite covered the new code - many people had assumed the tests were also vibe translated and couldn’t be trusted. Andrew pretends he didn’t understand that tests don’t catch all bugs, which is true of all software including Zig.

To me this whole exchange is mostly the typical “memory unsafe languages lead to time consuming and disruptive defects that can be almost entirely prevented with a choice of programming languages” versus the “git gud and don’t write bugs” response.

Layer on the AI tension, Anthropic’s involvement and Andrew’s classic Linus impersonation and of course its viral.

Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#183

Post by geraneum »

jonkoops wrote: post #142

What I have been missing in all this debate is substance. I don't care that Bun was ported to Rust; I don't care that Andrew wrote a hit piece about it; I don't care that Anthropic sells shovels in the gold rush. What I do care about is technical details. Jared shared some motivation as to why they ported to Rust, and I think they look valid (even if provided with sparse evidence). But I have not seen any sort of ref…

> What I have been missing in all this debate is substance.

That’s strange because in this (and Andrew’s in lesser extent) post there’s plenty of substance on both technical, management and corporate influences like the difference of styles guides vs agent instructions, binary size, compile time, Anthropic’s marketing and incentives, etc. It’s hard to miss.

Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#184

Post by jswny »

I agree with some of Kelley’s takes, but the issue is the tone.

Does anyone think that if Bun had been rewritten from Rust to Zig that a member of the Rust core team would have written a personal hit piece against Sumner (while pretending it isn’t a hit piece)? Probably not.

Kelley can write what he wants, but as the BDFL of a rising programming language, people are allowed to react if they don’t agree with the public image being portrayed by Zig.

Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#185

Post by nextaccountic »

self_awareness wrote: post #11

Yeah, but argumenting that "Bun codebase is a mess" is anti-Zig in itself. The whole point of the borrow checker is to make it impossible to write wrong code. If Zig accepts bad code, but assumes people will have self-discipline to maintain it, how is that different from C? C assumes good discipline, as well as C++. But it will happily accept bad code. So I'm not even sure what Zig is even improving on. Rust was desi…

The borrow checker is a good tool (and it makes Rust objectively better than Zig to me), but it unfortunately doesn't prevent writing bad code

An issue with Bun is that it interfaces with a C++ JS engine and it needs unsafe. In this case, the best practice is to write a safe binding to encapsulate this external dependency (that's why in Rust we have -sys crates with raw unsafe bindings, and other crates with a safe interface on top), and then write your business logic entirely in safe Rust

However, the Rust port of Bun didn't follow such best practices (perhaps with good SDD practices it could, not sure about that). The resulting code has literally thousands of unsafe blocks. It also contains plenty of UB. The port already costed hundreds of thousands of dollars. It's unclear if Mythos/Fable is able to refactor it further to remove unsafe usage without introducing further UB, and how much it will cost

(here It's important to note something. Rust UB is in some abstract sense harder to deal with than C or Zig UB, because it also needs to uphold the guarantees of safe Rust. If you get to write your business logic in safe Rust that's a good deal, but the price of that is that your unsafe code has extra responsibilities)

Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#186

Post by whizzter »

Zecc wrote: post #172
whizzter wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the old craftsmen vs industry issue, Andrew comes from the craftsman tradition that prefers all other people developing to also be proud craftsmen. What Java, JS, Python and C# all did to conquer the industry from a C++ dominance was to provide safety harnesses for less "perfectionist" workers to fumble around without causing a mess, to write C and C++ in an increasingly hostile world we realized you needed a lo…

That was a pretty good car analogy. Thank you. Edit to add: I'm unsure where assembly would sit in this analogy. Skateboard? Monocycle? Perhaps ice skates.

Ice skates with a rocket engine on your back?

Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#187

Post by entrope »

bubblegumcrisis wrote: post #70

When I see bullet point lists, I hit the back button. Is this just me? The smell of AI- it's like rotting vegetables.

Probably just you. I use them somewhat frequently to make it clear where a set breaks down into alternatives or parallel factors. If there's a preface and trailer around a list of complex items, I think writing the list in one paragraph is often ambiguous and hard to follow. Using a bullet list within that kind of paragraph (IMO) makes it easier to follow what I think is important.

Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#188

Post by handoflixue »

"We wrap LLMs in Agent harnesses because AI isn’t enough."

This feels equivalent to saying you're not a real coder if you need a compiler to hold your hand. What, a human coder isn't enough?

Of course we're going to improve tools by building more tools on top of them. That's how we went from punch cards to assembly to high-level languages!

Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#189

Post by dare944 »

etdznots wrote: post #69
brainless wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of those products are from big companies who seem to be struggling the most. Software does not solve bureaucracy. As an indie engineer, I have absolutely no doubt what I am doing myself. But that change does not mean my products will become popular. That is a lot beyond software. Also, the tooling is just barely 1.5 years old and people are already asking for world-changing results. All the while totally ignori…

I kind of disagree that asking for world changing results is setting the bar too high, people’s claims about their personal experience are that the world changing results are already here, productivity has been multiplied and costs have been reduced by some factor, and AFAICT everyone is using these tools, with many reporting a similar experience. The fact that people’s personal experience using the tool don’t cohere…

> it suggests that these tools might actually be better at delivering the perception to the user of increased productivity while real productivity gains are lower, or maybe zero, or maybe negative in some cases.

Or that the gains are in niche applications (like the GP's) that don't translate at scale.

Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#190

Post by TonyAlicea10 »

> It would be inconvenient if maintainability still mattered because their products default to making it worse.

I think this is the most important line from this piece.

Incentives matter. The AI companies are incentivized to have us believe that LLMs are the new compiler. That’s ridiculous (a coding LLM is a very very leaky abstraction) but I hear coders, especially coders with poor fundamentals, say it all the time.

This entire AI period has been a study in marketing disguised as futurism.

I say this as one who uses and teaches AI. What fantastic, amazing, unreliable tools. Extraordinary in the right hands, but engines of cognitive and technical debt.

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