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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

#761

Post by rcxdude »

unknownfuture wrote: post #376
dcre wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> since AI makes rewrites to certain languages relatively easy This premise makes no sense. AI makes rewrites to any language easy.

That's absolutely not true. Differently languages have greater or lesser representation in the training sets. You see a similar bias toward specific libraries within a given ecosystem, so much so that I worry about AI created technical monocultures as AI generated code converges to specific languages, packages, etc. The LLM companies have truly astounding power to now steer the direction of the entire industry. It sh…

That's not all there is to it, to be fair. Rust seems to work particularly well for LLMs in part because it's better at catching their errors.

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

#763

Post by rcxdude »

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…

You can hack things together pretty effectively in rust if you put your mind to it (so many things that bog people down in rust are due to focusing too hard on premature optimization of either performance or correctness), and the easier to use tooling really helps with that kind of thing. I use Rust for small one-off projects frequently just because it's easier to work with.

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

#764

Post by ultimafan »

TeriyakiBomb wrote: post #244
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…

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 agree with this wholeheartedly, it's harder to notice this in a field you are a professional in, but what really opened my eyes was noticing how often friction kept me from making mistakes in hobbyist metalworking/woodworking projects. More than once I've either made or didn't make mistakes based entirely on if the tool I "needed" for the next step was in arms reach or a walk across the garage and a search through multiple toolboxes.

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

#765

Post by waterTanuki »

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…

> 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 suites).

Not taking a side here in the whole Bun vs. ZSF dispute, but isn't the entire selling point of Rust that you get a bunch of battle-tested guarantees simply from compiling the program? Is there even a metric for battle-tested? I would say something like sqlite is battle tested vs a vibe-coded network server in c, but does that mean rewriting anything in rust truly mean starting all the way back at square one?

Also, didn't Anthropic roll out a version of CC using the Rust rewrite of bun? Surely they didn't just say "works on my machine" and chuck it into production?

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

#766

Post by baranul »

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…

There is also the fact of newer "closer to C" alternatives like C3[1] and Zen C[2], or more intriguing C family alternatives such as Odin[3], Jai[4], or Vlang[5].

Zig is kind of trapped. It can't go "head to head" with heavy weights like Rust, who specialize in safety, are more mature (post 1.0), and have lots of corporate support. Then there are the other C alternatives, who each offer something it doesn't have.

It appears the only way for it to maintain its position, is through heavy hype and marketing, but the whole Bun ordeal and extensive beta issues are subtracting from any such attempts.

[1]: https://c3-lang.org/

[2]: https://github.com/zenc-lang/zenc

[3]: https://learnxinyminutes.com/odin

[4]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdpD5QIVOKQ

[5]: https://codefreelance.net/apps/vlang.html

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

#768

Post by bigstrat2003 »

empath75 wrote: post #385
budsniffer952 wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Jarred has written Bun with very bad engineering standards "You're holding it wrong." > Jarred has managed public relations very poorly (e.g. ghosting the Zig foundation) What obligation do you think he has here? Which direction should these good relations flow? I'm also an outsider here, and reading this post was kind of shocking. Can't believe someone would attack your open source code. It's everything normies ha…

I'm basically of the opinion that if agents can't write your programming language, that's a problem with your programming language.

That is an absolutely foolish position to take. Basically, when given proof that agents need improvement you're sticking your fingers in your ears and going "nuh uh, it's not their fault".

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

#769

Post by nathansherburn »

robotnikman wrote: post #749
kalcode wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

As someone in the "not set for life" club, I worry a lot about my peers who are blind to the reality of AI progress. You don't have to believe AI is entirely hype to be anti-AI. It can be bad AND real.

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

#770

Post by endospore »

Tadpole9181 wrote: post #594
metoobruh wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not helping your case. > [what you just wrote] So they gained nothing from a Rust rewrite, except introducing more bugs into their shit codebase.

Except the blog post shows that they fixed a hundred or so known issues, patching several memory leaks and making the project viable for Prisma Compute's adoption - which it wasn't before. It's now running in production in two places just fine. Can you point to an equal number of issue tracker tickets showing novel bugs or regressions in the canary build?

Yes, they have introduced (at least) several times more memory safety issues by violating the rust specific rules. Check how most of their unsafe blocks are unsound and worse, how many are straight up incorrect with a total bs // SAFETY above it, leaving no sensible usage without invoking UB.

We often ensure a project holds water against miri. This one doesn't even pass for clippy.

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