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Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

raymyers.org

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

#211

Post by torginus »

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…

I don't even get what they gain by Rust - Bun imports Webkit, which is a C++ project, relying on it for stuff like JITing Javascript. I would say that's a major concern, and making sure the JIT doesn't emit anything broken or naughty is completely outside the scope of Rust.

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

#212

Post by Anon1096 »

embedding-shape wrote: post #63
bel8 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I don't understand these myopic takes. Jarred's post about Bun-Zig-Rust post was technical and polite. Andrew's post in response was anything but that.

I'm starting to think that a way we can easily filter what's being heavily composed by (SOTA/mainstream) LLMs or not is by how "polite" the public sees their published blog post. If everyone sees the post as "polite", most of it probably been written by LLMs, as they remove anything that could be seen as "nonpolite" and human. Meanwhile, engineers who just want to publish their own thoughts and feelings on a subject,…

Your post seems pretty polite. Did you have Claude write it for you?

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

#213

Post by ctvo »

ACCount37 wrote: post #180
petcat wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 used to think there's a good niche for "better C" - and that Zig was the one language angling for that. A language that can be used in the same contexts as C, to do the same things as C code, in very much the same way, but with some modern features, some stronger guarantees and some helpful syntactic sugar? A welcome thing for embedded development. On the other end, Rust to me felt like "better C++" - outside the e…

I wouldn’t write Zig off yet. The faster compilation time is a giant moat. Depending on how LLM usage evolves it could be what ends up mattering.

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

#214

Post by torginus »

vlaaad wrote: post #3

Did we read the same Anthropic and Andrew Kelly's posts? Anthropic is not in the programming language market; their post about rewriting Bun in Rust is full of technical details that led to improving the end product for their users. Zig's response is a sour opinion piece full of personal attacks. For context, I'm using Codex and have no interest in either Zig or Rust, so just observing this drama from the sidelines.

Andrew Kelley mentioned that the rewrite did bring technical improvements, however those were not tied to Rust and could've been made in the Zig codebase.

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

#215

Post by jraph »

entrope wrote: post #174
jraph wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Andrew is bitter (or something related) about this whole situation, that's no question, he writes it in his updated post (he doesn't say "bitter", but he speaks about unprocessed emotions). People are entitled to their emotions. The question is whether the bitterness is warranted. I think it is.

Yes, people are entitled to their emotions, but the ways they behave in public and express their emotions reflects on them in a major way. The Bun blog post focused on the technical reasons to change, and was complimentary about Zig. The Zig blog post was heavy on personal attacks, with some technical claims that the Bun blog post had mostly addressed already. Between the two, the Bun post is a lot more compelling fr…

[flagged]

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

#216

Post by pmarreck »

pydry wrote: post #209
manphone wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s the same reason why everyone doesn’t wanna read LLM generated blog posts. The agreement used to be generally that you would spend more time writing than I would have to spend reading and when the agreement changes the quality changes as well.

Or rather because they are always just of poor quality

Define “quality”

(I’m pretty sure both you and I would “know it when we see it”, but…)

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

#217

Post by nihsett »

Zig creator's article seems to have changed? I don't remember the bottom bit being there when I read it a few days ago.

> Ray’s story: Faced with a legitimate challenge of memory bugs, there were several viable options. Management eagerly approved the Rust rewrite option because it was a great marketing opportunity to showcase their new Fable model, Anthropic already uses Rust, and Zig is openly against using Anthropic’s products.

Kinda makes sense. They also tried to make a C compiler earlier in the year. Idk what happened to that.

I guess it's an experiment without much downside for Anthropic, if it works use it to make a point about AI assisted coding - if it doesn't bun users will learn a costly lesson but who cares, it will just be another case study to make their product better.

That said, I think it'd be great to see this actually work out.

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

#218

Post by r2vcap »

vga1 wrote: post #200
r2vcap wrote: post #170

Those 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 languag…

I'm on the same page with you that their AI stance is probably harmful for them -- but I think they wrote those as a reaction to the contributions from Bun and others. So your implied timeline is not entirely correct.

Nobody should feel insulted simply because a project decides to port its codebase to another language. It is a technical decision, not a personal attack.

Zig’s response has been a serious mistake. The TypeScript team ported the TypeScript compiler and language service from TypeScript to Go for TypeScript 7.0. Did anyone interpret that as the team insulting TypeScript itself? I certainly did not.

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

#219

Post by pmarreck »

ctvo wrote: post #213
ACCount37 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to think there's a good niche for "better C" - and that Zig was the one language angling for that. A language that can be used in the same contexts as C, to do the same things as C code, in very much the same way, but with some modern features, some stronger guarantees and some helpful syntactic sugar? A welcome thing for embedded development. On the other end, Rust to me felt like "better C++" - outside the e…

I wouldn’t write Zig off yet. The faster compilation time is a giant moat. Depending on how LLM usage evolves it could be what ends up mattering.

also, the fact that you can compile to any target from any target

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

#220

Post by frde_me »

embedding-shape wrote: post #84
woodruffw wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a huge stretch to call Bun’s post slander. It’s a relatively bland technical post with an extremely contextual negative opinion about Zig. I read both posts, and didn’t leave the Bun one with a negative opinion of Zig. But I did leave the response post with that opinion.

Yet one is technical and the one you actually got a negative opinion about a programming language supposedly isn't? I knew it was gonna happen at one point, guess I didn't believe it'd happen so soon, but I still can't believe that nowadays people make choices about what programming language to used based on what semi-celebrity they like the most, and it's all about emotional arguments. What happened and since when i…

> what semi-celebrity they like the most

The language in question here is maintained by a BDFL, which means that one person has outsized influence on the language, and it's direction.

In this context, I find it reasonable that if someone is ticked off by that BDFL, they might second guess the direction of the language itself. Since the opinions and emotions of that BDFL _will_ end up in the language and it's community.

This is different than some un-associated influencer having an opinion, and using that to choose a language.

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