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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

#772
post #78
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Polite but misleading in a way that makes zig look bad. So of course the response is sour.

Yes, it’s a misleading, self promoting marketing piece, of course the tone is different between them - I’m struggling to believe some of the tone policing comments here are entirely honest

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

#773

I'm not involved in this community, but I watched Andrew's interview with JetBrains a few weeks ago and I was really impressed. I don't currently have a project that would benefit from zig, but it's a language I want to explore when I have a good use case for it. I view his take as blunt but entirely reasonable. Bun's rewrite has made me nervous about using it. I do have a project that would theoretically benefit fro…

If left to my own devices, I can code 12-16 hour days. Have a crash day every 4-5 days, and then go back. It would be extremely unwise to merge even half of that stuff. I would frequently throw it away. Even before AI. It would be extremely naive to think that I am productive/efficient or responsible or a hard-worker for doing this.

Hey, I can party the way I like to party.

(I am old enough to catch myself and stop this cycle now)

Edit: I was super impressed with him in the first 10 minutes. It’s very Knuth-like to create a programming language because you had trouble building an audio system.

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

#774
post #660

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might be helpful to read the latest revision of Andrew's post, which may address this concern for you. It received several revisions: https://github.com/andrewrk/andrewkelley.me/commits/master/p...

To me, this addendum makes it worse. Making small edits to a post like this makes it seem like you're doubling down on the original resentful points, especially with all the new justifications like "a trillion dollar company fired the first shot." Should have just deleted the blog post in its entirety imho. >outstanding relationships with essentially everyone who openly uses Zig and talks about it publicly Essentiall…

>>outstanding relationships with essentially everyone who openly uses Zig and talks about it publicly

> Essentially everyone? more blogposts incoming?

Andrew is explicitly saying the opposite, but you're entitled to your supposition that that is bluster, I suppose.

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

#775

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might be helpful to read the latest revision of Andrew's post, which may address this concern for you. It received several revisions: https://github.com/andrewrk/andrewkelley.me/commits/master/p...

I don't think the style of multiple revisions to walk back the most problematic parts really helps the case. It very much leaves me with the impression that the original version is the one that the author really meant, with the revisions being just a weak attempt to deflect criticism.

So if you leave a post unchanged, it's proof you meant what you wrote; and if you edit it, it's even stronger proof you meant what you wrote, even if the edits signify some change.

I understand that many interpretations are open in such things, but this kind of logic seems ridiculous.

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

#776
post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t understand why anyone thinks management of any kind was involved in this at all. It seems much more plausible to me that Jarred just does what he wants. He has said as much.

> don’t understand why anyone thinks management of any kind was involved in this at all Because it’s marketing gold? Any marketer worth their salt would be super keen to get their claws into a project like this. Anthropic and friends are in then business of selling LLM’s. This is a demonstration of LLM capability, they’d be foolish to not even try to cash in on it.

Think about what you’re saying. If Jarred does it because he wants to, what does marketing have to add? How do they “cash in on it”?

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

#777
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

> By the engineer's wit of course!

Seeing how the Rust compiler isn't an LLM, it can't really work on wit.

From the POV of a programmer, how would you implement an unsafe block? What is disabled vs what's enabled?

> By detecting undefined behavior

Say you are tasked with making Miri; how do you detect violations of these rules?

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

#778
post #633

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it’s really the same old problem we’ve seen for decades. Developers write code. Owners declare victory. Owners rid themselves of expensive opex. Owners sell the division or try to keep the project limping along but all they see is vaguaries from the new cheap guy who they keep telling isn’t good enough for a raise, company hemorrhages money and eventually sells for a song. They’ve just found a way to explore that…

Owners and developers. I've been thinking about this a lot lately. Years ago, maybe in the late 2000s, when startups were becoming culturally significant, and "Tech" became an "Industry", two books were written and published: Founders at Work by Livingston, and Coders at Work by Seibel. I read both, and recall the Founders-book being a bit of a slog -- I only read it once[0]. The Coders-book, I have been re-reading i…

That was an excellent thoughtful comment, thanks. I'm going to be thinking about this part particularly:

> I suspect that the contest we are going to see in the next few years is: can Founders out-code Coders, or can Coders out-found Founders.

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

#779

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I knew that LLMs had caused reading comprehension to tank, but I quite literally already directly answered that question - as did the original article under discussion here.

You haven’t answered it, and I can’t find a fair reading that would lend itself to that interpretation either. You can easily correct me by quoting the part of the Bun post that you find to be “making a big fuss.” (Surely a relatively bland technical criticism of Zig - one that gets couched with praise - does not count as “a big fuss.”)

> making a big fuss about them in Zig - to the point of maintaining a compiler fork

Literal quote (and again, appeared in the original article as well). Forking the compiler to try to get faster compile times is a significant effort that absolutely counts as raising a fuss.

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

#780

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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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