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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

#741

Post by woodruffw »

overgard wrote: post #725
woodruffw wrote: post #705

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don’t think the basic idea that Zig is less safe than a language like Rust (and therefore has different classes of “endemic” bugs) is controversial among Zig programmers.

The points they make around explicit defers are a lot more subtle than it being too many lines. Quoting:

> For Zig code, when exactly should we be running the cleanup code? If we're passing the same *T to many different functions, how do we know when it's no longer accessible and can be cleaned up? How does it work when some functions need to continue to reference the memory after the function is called?

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

#742

Post by cute_boi »

bel8 wrote: post #22
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.

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.

Yea, but he was the one who started Twitter war on Zig. He framed Zig is bad because zig wouldn't accept my slop PR etc...

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

#743

Post by dwattttt »

selfmodruntime wrote: post #734
Ygg2 wrote: post #589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, and how does, in your opinion, compiler rules enforcement work in an unsafe block? And how does Miri help solve this issue?

> Ok, and how does, in your opinion, compiler rules enforcement work in an unsafe block? By the engineer's wit of course! > And how does Miri help solve this issue? By detecting undefined behavior caused by violation these rules

Is there a "Rust compiler's rule" you can point to that's harder than avoiding UB in C or C++ in similar circumstances? They strike me as very similar beasts.

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

#744

Post by kentm »

pmg101 wrote: post #687
bayindirh wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If you wanna travel faster you can build muscle, or you can just get in a car.

You have to get licensed to drive a car and there are rules. If you are caught breaking the rules you can be fined (or jailed if your rule breaking harms others enough). In extreme cases of rule breaking you can lose permission to drive the car.

This is all friction that is intended to make car-driving work at scale.

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

#745

Post by jonplackett »

piokoch wrote: post #322
jonplackett wrote: post #9

The thing is - is it a self fulfilling prophecy? We already know junior hiring an are down. And how many people are now excited to learn to code compared to 5years ago? How many of those excited people are ACTUALLY learning to code and not just learning to prompt? LLMs/agents will take over (or at least dominate) software dev even if they don’t get any better because humans will just get old and there’ll be no new hu…

Well, I see LLM coding capabilities as a great enabler for people who have some codeing-like skills or needs, but were not sufficiently skilled to do something more complicated. Think of people who are good at Excel, who use statistical tools like SAS, SPSS, other analytical software. Now they can ask LLM to create a Pandas/SAS lang script and do much more advanced stuff. People who were in the marketing data analysi…

If you push that ditch analogy though. Yeah we no longer dig ditches manually - but we also then all got overweight and weak because people aren’t doing any physical labour anymore. (Most people anyway)

And diggers absolutely do have a monopoly on digging ditches now.

I don’t see how someone learning to code now will ever be as good at coding as someone who learned before LLMs.

Just like right now no-one is gonna get better at digging ditches than people were before diggers - it just doesn’t make sense for someone to put the time and effort into that.

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

#746

Post by veber-alex »

cheikhcheikh wrote: post #160
embedding-shape wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> Incredible the different takeaways people get from text content on the internet It is incredible isn't it. "Jarred was already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs" "The grapevine was large and healthy and full of juicy grapes, and all those grapes contained the juice of the same message: Jarred was a stinky manager. Poor communication, unrealistic expectations, low empathy, no experience. Just a total sh…

Well at least he didn't call Jarred a monkey and a loser so Jarred is better off than the Github devs.

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

#747

Post by simjnd »

lolinder wrote: post #514
simjnd wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The example shows three extra lines of code, two of which are `defer`s. I'm not an expert in Zig and can't tell you whether the example they give is contrived, but the claim they're making is way more than "a wrapper type". > And that is considering humans write the code manually. Why does it matter if agents write the code? This makes no sense. Because the particular form of non-ergonomic code that is demonstrated h…

A wrapper class if you want, a wrapper type with methods / dedicated functions. Still, seems pretty ergonomic to me. Yeah we went from one line to three, but the three lines guarantee safety whereas the one doesn't so?

Also I'm not sure the token count is very relevant for an Anthropic employee who just spent 165k worth of token rewriting the whole thing in Rust. Sprinkling a few defers here and there and swapping types surely would have been immensely cheaper in tokens.

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

#748

Post by jdiff »

baranul wrote: post #740
jdiff wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vlang is a ridiculous project that was entirely driven by hype that should have been easy for all to see straight through. It is ridiculous that it got $800/month with nothing to show for it. I haven't seen any hate spread for it by Zig.

> Vlang is a ridiculous project With over 37,500 stars, over 2,300 forks, 826 contributors, books written on it (in Japanese and Portuguese, besides English), and a Wikipedia page; vlang is clearly a significant and successful open-source project. > entirely driven by hype People can plainly see Zig (and other HN pushed languages) directly engaging in marketing propaganda and hype (with HN accounts clearly stating th…

I don't see any hate in these references. Perhaps just truths you don't want to hear. I've seen your name pop up multiple times in past conversations about V in response to anything less than positive. What's your involvement with the language to watch its discussions so ardently?

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

#749

Post by robotnikman »

kalcode wrote: post #474
Lerc wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>When I read the post, my first thought was that I wouldn’t want to build things in Zig, because any technical decision I make, good or bad, might subject me to this kind of article from their BDFL. I think it is worse than that, the comments from people in threads about this suggest that this is an attitude that is creeping into the community. They may not be a majority, but if kinder souls decide to leave for a mor…

There seems to be a team sport mentality with AI topic in HN these days. Almost feels like people are picking sides, and thus not being very thoughtful or rational. Sigh, there definitely an attitude creeping into the community and it's a huge turn off unfortunately.

>There seems to be a team sport mentality with AI topic in HN these days. Almost feels like people are picking sides, and thus not being very thoughtful or rational.

If you are financially set for the rest of your life - Pro AI

If you are not financially set for the rest of your life - Anti AI

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

#750

Post by Rendello »

iamflimflam1 wrote: post #487
laserbeam wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But I'm glad he stayed honest to himself instead and didn't have a PR team ghostwrite his thoughts. If there's one thing I learned in this debacle is "I should spend 1-2 days and send to a close friend before hitting publish on a firey reply." The way Andrew rephrased the closing section is the kind of thing I should publish on the first edit in similar scenarios.

Early on in my career I wrote a highly critical email - I asked a coworker for his opinion before I sent. He said “there’s just one thing that would improve this” and hit the delete button. That intervention saved me, and everyone I was working with, from a lot of unnecessary stress. Venting is great - get it out of your system. Then take a deep breath, go for a walk, and then decide what to do.

Abraham Lincoln used to write angry letters and stow them away, unsigned and unsent [1]. The book "How to Win Friends and Influence People" claims he stopped harshly criticizing people publicly after being challenged to a duel [2] by a government official he had attacked anonymously in the press.

1. https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/lincolns-...

2. https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/abraham-lincolns...

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