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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

#461

Post by chuckadams »

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…

> To me it reads like Bun was forked. Will the Zig version survive? Will the Rust one? Both? All options ok.

Maintenance of the zig code was abandoned, while the port continued in the same repo, and it's unlikely any work on the zig branch will keep momentum. So yes it forked, but more in the fork+exec sense (or maybe just exec, the analogy's not that great).

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

#462

Post by simjnd »

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.

Yeah since my whole point is about the technical merits of the rewrite article, I don't count that as justification.

Why is just a wrapper type "less ergonomic"? Everybody does that all the time in every language. And then if you can convince me it is less "ergonomic": why does it matter if it solves the problem? And that is considering humans write the code manually. Why does it matter if agents write the code? This makes no sense.

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

#463

Post by moomoo11 »

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…

i appreciate people saying it like it is.

like linus lol

i hate marketing pr speak when it comes to technical things.

save that for the non technical customers

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

#464

Post by lproven »

mbesto wrote: post #344
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.

You can't unilaterally say all AI blogs are low quality. That's bullshit. > would spend more time writing than I would have to spend reading To your point however, the reason people don't like AI generated blogs is because there is a explicit recognition that the author of the blog lacked effort . There is a visceral response for the reader about the social contract "if you didn't spend as much time as I did why shou…

> You can't unilaterally say all AI blogs are low quality. That's bullshit.

Watch me.

I absolutely can and do. And pictures, and videos, and picture posts, and comics, and all image-format content.

If it wasn't worth creating with someone's brain, it is never ever worth my time to consume the prompt output.

Send me the prompt. I might look, if I'm bored.

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

#465

Post by stellamariesays »

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…

[flagged]

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

#466

Post by Aurornis »

cfiggers wrote: post #222
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 would say the flagship Zig project is TigerBeetle, not Bun.

TigerBeetle has a unique static memory allocation strategy at launch time. It’s a strategy that sidesteps a lot of memory management issues but only works for very specific use cases.

Their success with this strategy isn’t portable to most other projects. I think they really need more traditional flagship projects that generalize to typical memory management use cases. The way the conversation keeps coming back to TigerBeetle as a success story isn’t helpful to anyone trying to evaluate the memory management angle.

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

#467

Post by agentultra »

renox wrote: post #429
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…

> And, on the other end, C's warts, footguns and ancient quirks also matter less if you have an LLM plow through it. 'plow through it's?? An LLM can definitedly fall into these traps! Happened to me a few months ago, I couldn't believe that an LLM would generate a use-after-free in not-so-complex code but it did.. Newer LLM seems better now but buyer beware!

You still need an expert human to drive an LLM. And even then, with C, you need to be very careful. LLM’s generate lots of code. Code that has no obvious errors in it. The kind humans aren’t good at picking up on their own. You need other tooling in place to support human experts to prevent this kind of stuff as you would in a non-LLM contribution.

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

#469

Post by bayindirh »

sph wrote: post #356
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…

Yes, there is a widespread belief in tech that 'removing friction' is a good direction to aim for. But you can have too little friction that completely ruins a product and the user experience. In game design friction very important; remove all friction and you don't even have a game any more, you might as well show the You Win screen. My favourite metaphor for it is sex: there is no sex without friction. What LLM hav…

You can't build muscle without resistance, you can't cook ideas without friction.

Both needs heat.

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

#470

Post by andsoitis »

vga1 wrote: post #179
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 think the mistake people are making currently is that they publicize stuff way too early. I.e. they make a prototype and then put that out there. Possibly with a full product page and all. People did this also before LLM, but the difference is that now the prototype is a fully functional product in the technical sense whereas before it was little more than a glorified Hello World. The human effort and calendar time…

> There's gonna be amazing products made with LLM

You think more amazing than what was made without LLM?

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