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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

#721

Post by [deleted] »

bel8 wrote: post #627
mawadev wrote: post #555

There are a lot of posts going on, but let me just post this link to a specific file of the bun zig code base so you can have your own impression: https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/blob/bun-v1.1.42/src/bundler/... My take is they vibe coded too close to the sun

I'm left with a good impression. Lot's of comments on the whys and historic context. Backed by tons of tests. Yes the file could use some modularisation and splitting into smaller parts but maybe the gains were weighted and judged against. That file is a great example of KISS.

[deleted]

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

#722

Post by palmotea »

Lerc wrote: post #591
theptip wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I think AI could well destroy this community. There’s a lot of personal identity tied up in being a hacker (broadly defined), and only some aspects of that identity will be strengthened by AI. Similar to Go and Chess, AI might make “programming for beauty” more accessible and popular. However it will almost certainly make the act of writing “code for money” much less valuable, which means many people will stop…

>I really empathize with those who loved the craft of code golf, algorithms, literate programming, the elegance of micro structure of programs, etc. and who see their world under threat. I love all of those things but don't feel threatened by AI. I do weird microcontroller things, I have dweets on https://beta.dwitter.net I have a website for making animations using 50 characters of a custom stack expression code. Al…

> I think the animosity to AI is more complex. There's combinations of anger about wealth disparity, a loss of trust, another of Sagan's great demotions, and this weird anticapitalist embracing of a hypercapitalist notion of Intellectual property.

I think a lot of the animosity is fear. For decades, software engineering/development/programming provided good wages,relative stability, and often satisfyingly challenging work. You saw a lot of people from secure parts of the economy being told to "learn to code," to secure their futures. Now you've got business leaders racing hard to push us into economic obsolescence or precarity (because that's where they want all labor).

It's not some bullshit about "personal identity tied up in being a hacker (broadly defined)" or liking code golf.

I think a lot of the enthusiasm of AI is from people who are too arrogant to read the writing on the wall, and it doesn't help that software engineers were paid so well for so long that many of us forgot we are laborers and confused themselves for billionaires (and adopted billionaire ideology, like libertarianism and opposition to unions).

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

#723

Post by em-bee »

ksec wrote: post #636
metoobruh wrote: post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

>What Bun did here is basically a sabotage of Zig's reputation. No a single soul thought Bun was doing anything against Zig's reputation apart from a few people in Zig. They are the one being over sensitive. When the whole internet was on Zig's side and not a single soul which are normally on Rust came it to support. But somehow it is sabotage of zig? There is a whole lot of different between being rude and direct to…

who let the dogs out?

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

#724

Post by ACCount37 »

wren6991 wrote: post #499
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. Warts and ancient quirks, I can kind of see, but in what way have LLMs solved the footguns?

Mostly, by having enough diligence and attention to avoid a lot of the common ones.

By now, if we're pitting a top of the line coding LLM against a B-tier programmer throwing something together in a hurry, I would expect the latter to shot more foot, and not by a narrow margin. Even those who know better don't always do better - for a human, "fucks given" is a painfully finite resource.

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

#725

Post by overgard »

woodruffw wrote: post #705
overgard wrote: post #700

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me it's just highlighting the reality -- Anthropic fired the first shots. I think it's reasonable for people to say, hey, if you're going to trash the reputation of Zig (in a pretend-objective way) then it's entirely fair for people to put in important context that Bun was not written well.

I really struggle to find a plain, non-motivated reading of the Bun's post that could be fairly described as a "trashing." It's a very bland post.

They're suggesting that the bugs are endemic to using Zig and couldn't be prevented by a modified coding style. Then they point out that the well known way to avoid the issue (defer) is "not ergonomic" (really one extra line is that bad?) It seems like a lot of misinformation couched in a reasonable sounding tone, which is par for the course for how these labs operate.

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

#726

Post by overgard »

edude03 wrote: post #717
overgard wrote: post #702

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nitpick, but this is misunderstanding GLPs (I'm on them). If you don't change your diet and your habits, yeah, you'll temporarily lose weight but it'll come right back when you're off it AND you'll lose a lot of muscle. You kinda still need to do "the right things", it's not a magic cure all. (Of course, same thing can be said of AI).

A fair callout, though yes it was supposed to be a simplified analogy. I think you got it exactly right though that its temporary in the same that I'd argue the benefits of using AI are temporary

I definitely agree with your overall point, just wanted to correct that one thing.

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

#727

Post by jraph »

Aurornis wrote: post #391
jraph wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't intend to write misleading stuff that makes Zig look bad when you leave and if you avoid ghosting the Zig foundation in scheduled meetings you had with them, I suppose you should be good.

> If you don't intend to write misleading stuff that makes Zig look bad What misleading stuff? Makes Zig look bad how? The posts I read were appreciative to Zig. The only “misleading” piece of either blog post that I recall was the Andrew Kelley claim that Bun wasn’t fuzzing, which was easily refuted by pointing to their fuzzing work. If there’s something more then I’d like to see it, but every time I ask nobody can…

It's the "Bun is better in Rust" section which is misleading, where most things could have been done in Zig as well with a comparable amount of work (if we don't count the rewrite itself).

This section can also give the impression that the LLM rewrite itself brought those improvements, which it didn't.

Nor the LLM rewrite nor Rust in itself brought these improvements, extra work did.

The fuzzing thing also does looks bad and nothing was refuted: just by reading the bun post one could think they've been fuzzing for a long time, but it started only a few months before the rewrite, which makes it almost irrelevant: the result never shipped, or only for a short time. The whole thing looks like this: technically correct so hard to criticize because people can tell you "well no, the post doesn't say this!", but deceitful, with important omissions.

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

#728

Post by LtWorf »

woodruffw wrote: post #265
LtWorf wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Someone pays your living, I’m guessing. But I trust that you aren’t unduly motivated by their interests, because you’re a human with your own thoughts and opinions. I ask you kindly to grant me the same presumption.

Nah, I would not comment on things related to my employer's business because that might mean they could sue me for damages or insider trading or all sort of things.

I'm sure the same applies to you.

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

#729

Post by vlovich123 »

guardiangod wrote: post #530
vlovich123 wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C/C++ is low friction compared to Rust? Wow. We have very different experiences.

If your objective is just to hack something together quickly to test an idea, and doesn't care if the application segfault 6 hours later (eg. a prototype game engine), C++ is definitely the superior choice to Rust. Rust is like the instructor demanding that you build your house up to the national code, down to the choice of nail for your floor board. Your house will be perfect, but building it is extremely difficult…

I can get cross platform rust up and building and running with 5 minutes. It’s probably half a day at least for c++ and a more significant maintenance burden.

Also, I think the “quick to prototype” only is beneficial if you know c++ and don’t know rust. I know both and I can say that Rust is much faster to prototype in precisely because

a) tests are trivial to add meaning it’s trivial to add test coverage vs in c++ you have to integrate gtest and bother to set that up which no one does B) many initial startup bugs are prevented. It’s not segfault after 6 hours but spend hours getting it to work correctly after it compiles vs it runs mostly correctly from the first build.

Even if Rust is slower to write (which is only true if you don’t know Rust and don’t have AI) it’s still overall faster to develop in. I can’t recall if MS or Google have written up their experience on that side or focused only on impact to vulnerabilities.

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