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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

#811

Post by witx »

brainless wrote: post #286
witx wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have a very fitting username

I am not sure if you mean good, bad or ugly but yeah this username is perhaps with me since 1998. I used to hang around in MIT, Stanford and many other Uni IRC rooms. I was this odd username from a far away city. Tim Berners-Lee once asked me about the real person behind the username. I almost shat my pants but somehow I answered. I am sure you have a great story for your username and the blank HN profile too.

It was a tongue in cheek joke.

Looking at your profile it's clear you're heavily invested in passing the idea that "AI is going to take our jobs" as if you have some money in the game ...

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

#812

Post by [deleted] »

coldtea wrote: post #807
ashishb wrote: post #583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think most organizations don't want to increase their Java usage. And the reason is not technical. Technically, it is a great language. Legally, it feels risky to most.

I think that's absolute wrong. The situation with Java is absolutely clear.

[deleted]

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

#813

Post by nicce »

araoz wrote: post #495
jonkoops wrote: post #142

What I have been missing in all this debate is substance. I don't care that Bun was ported to Rust; I don't care that Andrew wrote a hit piece about it; I don't care that Anthropic sells shovels in the gold rush. What I do care about is technical details. Jared shared some motivation as to why they ported to Rust, and I think they look valid (even if provided with sparse evidence). But I have not seen any sort of ref…

the best way I've seen it described is like this: Bun wants to move fast and breaks things, Zig forces you to move slow and carefully. Bun wants to ship new features ASAP (a shell lang, sqlite/pg client, etc), so they'd really want stuff like memory management out of the way. Zig forces you to think and deal with memory management, lifetimes, etc. Rust is just a better fit like w `Drop`, and Zig explicitly won't add…

[dead]

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

#814

Post by eproxus »

raincole wrote: post #682
jraph wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that hit piece would be an answer to the (multi-billion dollar) studio saying how much better the result is after the rewrite to Unreal, except it's not because Unreal is better (which it could be btw, or not, or more probably it depends on the use case), it's because the studio worked hard to make it look better, which they could have done without the rewrite. Anthropic does this to sell LLM rewrites and make th…

There was an almost exact example of this: City Skyline 2. It's (was) a poorly optimized game and they said Unity's DOTS didn't match their expectation, making Unity look bad, while some issues (like they didn't use LoD where they should have) weren't Unity's fault. And even in this case, it'd be extremely weird if Unity published a blog post about how City Skyline's studio is a "Just a total shit show, from an emplo…

This is actually is an interesting example, because Cities Skylines 2 has been handed over from Colossal Order to Iceflake Studios recently and since then they have (in my opinion) quickly been able to improve and fix a lot of things that CO weren't able pull off for years. So perhaps CO's development was somewhat of a "total shit show"?

I'm not saying Unity should publish PR about how Unity is working well and this handover and subsequent fixes proves it, but I think you could argue that they could and that they would have at least some facts to back it up with.

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

#816

Post by cyber_kinetist »

lolinder wrote: post #524
cyber_kinetist wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We can gradually refactor it Is quite a hell of a statement, when memory management issues are highly nonlocal and need some careful design upfront in order for you to nail it. Unsafe isn't something that you can gradually clean up. Even one single flawed usage of unsafe (an ill-assumed invariant) can poison the whole program in scary ways, and might require a total refactor of your codebase to fix it.

You realize that what you're describing is inherent complexity in memory management? This is not something that you can dodge by using Zig, it's just part of the domain. The difference is that in Rust you get strong guarantees for everything that is not inside of unsafe and clearly demarcated areas where things might go wrong. Even if you never eliminate a single unsafe block, the clear demarcation is valuable as an…

The art of Unsafe Rust is marking the right demarcation with the right set of invariants that Safe code must adhere to inside the module that uses Unsafe. If you do this incorrectly, then even Safe code outside the unsafe block can cause undefined behavior.

Which is why having unsafe code without exactly specified invariants is practically useless: the Bun rewrite code has too many SAFETY comments that are incorrect and misleading, so most of the unsafe demarcations aren't helpful in achieving UB-free code.

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

#817

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#818

Post by maleldil »

veber-alex wrote: post #703
maleldil wrote: post #593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> translate it to Rust catching all the memory bugs in the process That's not possible. If it were, you'd just fix the memory bugs directly in the original language. Your best bet is to have a translation littered with unsafe blocks, so you still have to do the work of nailing down the specifics to make them safe. There's no magic "unsafe language" -> "safe Rust" pipeline, even with GenAI.

You really think AI can't convert unsafe blocks to safe code? The reason AI can't fix memory unsafety in the original language is the same reason humans can't do it. There isn't enogh feedback from the compiler.

I imagine it could, eventually, if not now. The Bun translation used Anthropic's best model, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and still contained a large number of unsafe blocks. Maybe if they left the agent running for longer, using Miri for verification?

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

#819

Post by frou_dh »

sph wrote: post #128
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…

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…

Great point. It is simply lame impatient clout-chasing when someone goes out and promotes their project that is approximately as new to them as it is to the people they're promoting it to.

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

#820

Post by dakolli »

adwn wrote: post #684
dakolli wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

uhhh, that's not how the how that figure speech goes. There's a reason why people say all publicity is good publicity, and you can't just flip that to fit your perspective.

People repeat that figure of speech because it's a meme (in the original sense of the word), not because it's unconditionally true.

No, they repeat it because it's literally true.
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