Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

raymyers.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

441–450 of 862 posts

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

#441

Post by selfmodruntime »

lunar_mycroft wrote: post #393
herrkanin wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How is that better than the Zig codebase you started with? In contrast with the Zig codebase, you now have clear well-scoped unsafe boundaries you can iteratively fix one by one. This was not the case before.

Except that writing safe rust often requires designing the architecture around rust's ownership model, meaning a file by file, line by line translation doesn't necessarily leave you much closer to safe rust than you were at the start.

This is untrue. You can do a file by file translation by using clone and copy liberally. After you're done, you can incrementally introduce borrowing.

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

#443

Post by skydhash »

adamddev1 wrote: post #300

In this whole discussion of what can be done with AI, I think a lot of people are missing the distinction between: A. making consumer end-user apps, basic enterprise applications (making end products) B. making tooling, libraries, languages (making things people build on top of) What is the "software engineering" that AI will replace? A? Or both A and B? Just because people can get away with using AI to make A apps t…

> Just because people can get away with using AI to make A apps that are "good enough" or pass test suites

That requires some proof, because the trend is that users of A apps dislike the lack of engineering that comes with AI involvement.

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

#444

Post by selfmodruntime »

cyber_kinetist wrote: post #203
herrkanin wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How is that better than the Zig codebase you started with? In contrast with the Zig codebase, you now have clear well-scoped unsafe boundaries you can iteratively fix one by one. This was not the case before.

> clear well-scoped unsafe boundaries This is not done by blindly porting Zig code 1:1 and calling it a day. You do have to make conscious decisions about code architecture to manage Unsafe code, since you need choose the right invariants for your Safe Rust code to conform inside the module (Note that unsafe pollutes the whole module containing it, not just the code inside the unsafe block!)

There is almost zero reason for a public facing, non-embedded project like Bun to use unsafe anywhere.

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

#445

Post by Shorel »

whizzter wrote: post #126
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.

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…

Where is D-lang in your car analogy? Would it be a Ferrari? :)

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

#446

Post by deaux »

sph wrote: post #128
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…

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…

> I don’t care about your Show HN unless you have spent a month on it.

100%, you actually stated it correctly. It's not "I don't care unless you've written/reviewed everything by hand". If someone writes something by hand in an hour, including ideation, and puts it on Show HN, realistically it's almost certainly not going to be worth even looking at.

I've been running an app in prod for more than a year now, mostly vibecoded long before HN believed it was possible - HN only started believing this around Jan this year at the earliest. But nobody who uses it cares, or even notices, because it took a month to build. That's what matters, the amount of time and thought put into it. Of course it's true that vibecoded projects have a much lower median amount of time and thought put into it. But that's like Louisiana having a much lower median income than California, it's just a median, not an inherent characteristic of being a Louisianan vs a Californian, there are plenty of poorer Californians and richer Louisianans.

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

#447

Post by woodruffw »

Arainach wrote: post #435
woodruffw wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Where are they making a big fuss?

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

#448

Post by selfmodruntime »

baokaola wrote: post #283
cyber_kinetist wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> clear well-scoped unsafe boundaries This is not done by blindly porting Zig code 1:1 and calling it a day. You do have to make conscious decisions about code architecture to manage Unsafe code, since you need choose the right invariants for your Safe Rust code to conform inside the module (Note that unsafe pollutes the whole module containing it, not just the code inside the unsafe block!)

There's only one language that's more dangerous than C and that is unsafe Rust. I say that only half-jokingly.

It's true and I write Rust and love it dearly. There is an entire book about working with the unsafe keyword and its aliasing rules: https://doc.rust-lang.org/nomicon/working-with-unsafe.html

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

#449

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#450

Post by selfmodruntime »

Ygg2 wrote: post #298
baokaola wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's only one language that's more dangerous than C and that is unsafe Rust. I say that only half-jokingly.

Good job falling for the Zig propaganda. I say that half-jokingly. EDIT: You can't be serious people. Rust unsafe is safer than C, if for nothing else, for knowing which pointers are aliasable.

This isn't propaganda, the Rust compiler's rules when using the unsafe keyword are difficult to uphold, which is why the community wrote Miri.
Post reply on HN