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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

#431

Post by afavour »

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…

TFA article addresses this directly. The write up is good but it is selectively written to contain almost exclusively positives.

Like build times: they rewrote the Zig compiler to improve them, but Rust build times are typically much slower. Why no discussion of that at all?

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

#432

Post by UltraSane »

manphone wrote: post #208
sph wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They get abandoned because they get generated on a whim. Sunk cost fallacy can be a feature: if you have spent a lot of blood, sweat, and tears on a project, you are more likely to push it through adversity and the doldrums that inevitably one will encounter. If all it took was one of those momentarily brilliant ideas and a prompt on Claude to produce something, there is no attachment whatsoever to it. Speaking as th…

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.

Reading the output of a LLM prompt someone else wrote isn't useful as I can run the prompt myself. Having the prompt is actually more useful because I can run it in any LLM I want.

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

#433

Post by z0ltan »

eatonphil wrote: post #290
cfiggers wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say the flagship Zig project is TigerBeetle, not Bun.

If TigerBeetle is the Zig flagship then Zig is untenable for almost any team, because Tiger Style is untenable for almost any team. No, I think that Tiger Style makes Zig mostly unimportant. On the other hand, as a corporate backer for Zig, TigerBeetle is definitely a big deal. But in terms of exemplary and imitable projects in the ecosystem I would think something like Ghostty is the safer label for "flagship".

[dead]

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

#434

Post by groundzeros2015 »

deaton wrote: post #359
TeriyakiBomb wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A drum I've been banging increasingly often recently is that having friction and time to work ideas over in your mind adds huge amounts of value. Vibe coded projects have this very specific, well, vibe to them where you can clearly see that the lack of time to digest has allowed the person to not challenge their own worst impulses. You can see it in the feature bloat, the lack of depth and polish in core features and…

I think you're right, and I think this principle of friction-is-good-actually applies to a lot more domains than just software, but whether the world will ever accept that is a different question.

I know of some financial analysts who don’t like to pull data in from reports automatically. They prefer to read each row and copy it into their spreadsheet because they actually contemplate what the number means.

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

#435

Post by Arainach »

woodruffw wrote: post #424
Arainach wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don’t think the post was deceptive or dishonest in its claims Presenting only one side of argument (only pros, no cons, etc.) is deceptive and dishonest. The fact that they were incredibly focused on build time in Zig and didn't even talk about it as a tradeoff going to Rust is very telling.

Are we talking about the same post? This is the one I’m talking about[1], and I can’t see where it’s claimed that Rust’s build times are better. Apologies if I’m missing it. (The one reference I found to Rust’s compile times is them talking about how they had to split their Rust rewrite into 100 crates. A plain reading of this is the opposite of what you’re saying: they’re pointing out that Rust’s compile times are s…

You don't have to claim that they're better, but making a big fuss about them in Zig - to the point of maintaining a compiler fork - and then not talking about it at all in the Rust doc (where it's apparent to anyone who's used Rust that compilation there is guaranteed to be slower) is dishonest or at least massively hypocritical.

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

#436

Post by selfmodruntime »

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…

> How is that better than the Zig codebase you started with?

It's worse, and I say this as an avid Rust fan and programmer. Try Miri with the new Bun project. It's currently blowing up. The Rust compiler's non-unsafe aliasing rules still need to hold during unsafe, which are far more complex than writing correct Zig code. That's the trade-off about Rust: The compiler has a ton of clever proofs for safe code, but if you're on your own, you'll have to do the work yourself.

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

#437

Post by the__alchemist »

saghm wrote: post #400
torginus wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't have a strong stance on the overall issue of whether it made sense for them to port like this, but I feel like this misunderstands the value proposition of Rust. The point of Rust is not and has never been "make literally everything safe", it's "push the unsafe boundary as low as possible and keep as much as possible above it so that you can reduce the surface area for unsafety and more easily find bugs in th…

> Rust is not and has never been "make literally everything safe", it's "push the unsafe boundary as low as possible and keep as much as possible above it so that you can reduce the surface area for unsafety and more easily find bugs in the unsafe code".

Another definition: Rust is a lang to "Run fast and low-level software/firmware, with nicer tools, features, and syntax than the other langs which can do this"!

Obviously, the value proposition you find in this case depends on the subjective nature of that regarding rust vs zig!

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

#438

Post by [deleted] »

rafterydj wrote: post #249
stingraycharles wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also don’t really like his closing section, it has a big “sorry but not sorry” feeling to it.

I read that as him beginning the healing stages. Acknowledging his flaws as soon as he could even if he couldn't change what he already said - because that post did blow up, if he had taken the whole thing down it may have just exacerbated things.

[deleted]

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

#439

Post by selfmodruntime »

p-e-w wrote: post #181
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 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 langu…

The industry isn't biting @ Zig because it's unstable, notoriously difficult to integrate new changes into an existing codebase and because the compiler is a bitch to develop with (hard error on unused variables with no way to turn it off).

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

#440

Post by afavour »

lolinder wrote: post #398
simjnd wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could point to the same examples this article refers to: the Bun blog post says "Having a rigid style guide [in Zig] with clear ownership expectations explicitly spelled out in the type system was a real option for Bun" and presents no technical reason why they didn't choose (or even TRY) that. They handwave it with "This is and ergonomic than the Zig we expect". Why was it in their own words a real option? And why…

The very next sentence justifies why they didn't do it: it argues that they would have ended up with what was technically Zig but something that was much less ergonomic than what would be expected from Zig. You can argue that that's a bad justification for not doing it, but that's a debate on the technical merits, not a claim that they didn't provide justification.

As the article mentions, the follow on question from that is: why does that matter if your codebase is written exclusively by AI agents?
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