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Hobby x86 kernel written with Zig

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Re: Hobby x86 kernel written with Zig

#11

Post by rvz »

nicoburns wrote: post #10
guggle wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I used to do this in Rust but I switched to zig for maintainability and readability over Rust. Can you expand on this ? I'm asking out of curiosity because I want to learn a "system" programming language (for whatever definition there is to this term). So far I briefly tried Rust and Nim and found the former more difficult to read. I know nothing about Zig, how would you place it between these two ?

Zig is lower level than either (it's more like C than C++: expect to manually call 'free'on allocated values). It has a lot of nice improvments over C however, like proper arrays, no null, a module system, and proper compile time evaluation (no need for the hacky preprocessor).

I found the module system for C interop, quite innovative and was surprised to see that Rust didn't even have such a thing. If you compare bindgen to this approach, bindgen just seems like double work and harder to maintain autogenerated bindings.

I have seen both Zig and Swift use the module system very well despite several devs strangely saying its somewhat complicated, but when used for low-level development this makes Zig an interesting language to use for language bindings.

Re: Hobby x86 kernel written with Zig

#12

Post by sobeston »

simias wrote: post #9
guggle wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I used to do this in Rust but I switched to zig for maintainability and readability over Rust. Can you expand on this ? I'm asking out of curiosity because I want to learn a "system" programming language (for whatever definition there is to this term). So far I briefly tried Rust and Nim and found the former more difficult to read. I know nothing about Zig, how would you place it between these two ?

I'm curious too, I'm quite familiar with Rust and never written any Zig in my life so I went digging through the source and I find the syntax remarkably similar for the most part. The only thing that stood out is that apparently you can drop the braces for single-line `if` bodies like in C whereas Rust makes them always mandatory but I'm firmly on Rust's side on this one. The part where Rust can get really messy is w…

Traits are a part of the stdlib (under std.meta) as opposed to the language. This is unlikely to change

Re: Hobby x86 kernel written with Zig

#13

Post by netgusto »

guggle wrote: post #6
jackhalford wrote: post #4

Hi, author here! I've just finished writing the pre-emptive multitasking [0](only round robbin though, nothing fancy). I'm currently writing an ATA driver [1], the idea is to implement ext2. I used to do this in Rust but I switched to zig for maintainability and readability over Rust. It seems that with `comptime` I'm able to make a lot of things optimal. Overall I have to say kernel programming is _hard_ but very re…

> I used to do this in Rust but I switched to zig for maintainability and readability over Rust. Can you expand on this ? I'm asking out of curiosity because I want to learn a "system" programming language (for whatever definition there is to this term). So far I briefly tried Rust and Nim and found the former more difficult to read. I know nothing about Zig, how would you place it between these two ?

Bouncing on recently featured HN thread "Hello World": https://drewdevault.com/2020/01/04/Slow.html (and the HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21954886)

According to this resource, Zig produces code that is very close to the hand written assembly for the simple use case of outputing "hello world" on the stdout.

This is to be taken with a grain of salt though, as of course, caring about the assembly output is a spectacular case of premature optimization. I guess it tells a bit about the goal of Zig as a low-level programming language though.

Re: Hobby x86 kernel written with Zig

#14

Post by dnautics »

rvz wrote: post #11
nicoburns wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zig is lower level than either (it's more like C than C++: expect to manually call 'free'on allocated values). It has a lot of nice improvments over C however, like proper arrays, no null, a module system, and proper compile time evaluation (no need for the hacky preprocessor).

I found the module system for C interop, quite innovative and was surprised to see that Rust didn't even have such a thing. If you compare bindgen to this approach, bindgen just seems like double work and harder to maintain autogenerated bindings. I have seen both Zig and Swift use the module system very well despite several devs strangely saying its somewhat complicated, but when used for low-level development this…

I wrote a library for ffi (nifs) in elixir using zig, and a long term goal is for it to be easier to use zig as an intermediary for c library ffi than it is to use c.

Already importing blas into elixir with it is crazy easy.

Re: Hobby x86 kernel written with Zig

#15

Post by swiley »

simias wrote: post #9
guggle wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I used to do this in Rust but I switched to zig for maintainability and readability over Rust. Can you expand on this ? I'm asking out of curiosity because I want to learn a "system" programming language (for whatever definition there is to this term). So far I briefly tried Rust and Nim and found the former more difficult to read. I know nothing about Zig, how would you place it between these two ?

I'm curious too, I'm quite familiar with Rust and never written any Zig in my life so I went digging through the source and I find the syntax remarkably similar for the most part. The only thing that stood out is that apparently you can drop the braces for single-line `if` bodies like in C whereas Rust makes them always mandatory but I'm firmly on Rust's side on this one. The part where Rust can get really messy is w…

If you want more syntax weirdness: tab characters are illegal.

Re: Hobby x86 kernel written with Zig

#16

Post by dnautics »

simias wrote: post #9
guggle wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I used to do this in Rust but I switched to zig for maintainability and readability over Rust. Can you expand on this ? I'm asking out of curiosity because I want to learn a "system" programming language (for whatever definition there is to this term). So far I briefly tried Rust and Nim and found the former more difficult to read. I know nothing about Zig, how would you place it between these two ?

I'm curious too, I'm quite familiar with Rust and never written any Zig in my life so I went digging through the source and I find the syntax remarkably similar for the most part. The only thing that stood out is that apparently you can drop the braces for single-line `if` bodies like in C whereas Rust makes them always mandatory but I'm firmly on Rust's side on this one. The part where Rust can get really messy is w…

It uses "comptime" which, loosely, is a compile time version of the language. I would say it's a huge improvement over C in that quite frankly string interpolation for a preprocessor is terrible. I can't compare to rust since my brain can't parse rust syntax; too many bells and whistles.

Re: Hobby x86 kernel written with Zig

#17

Post by ajxs »

jackhalford wrote: post #4

Hi, author here! I've just finished writing the pre-emptive multitasking [0](only round robbin though, nothing fancy). I'm currently writing an ATA driver [1], the idea is to implement ext2. I used to do this in Rust but I switched to zig for maintainability and readability over Rust. It seems that with `comptime` I'm able to make a lot of things optimal. Overall I have to say kernel programming is _hard_ but very re…

Great work! I'm just behind you working on my own alternate language x86 kernel in Ada: https://github.com/ajxs/cxos

Admittedly I don't know much about Zig, but it's good to see people investigating languages other than C. I'm still not convinced of Rust's merits in this area, we'll see how this develops with time.

Re: Hobby x86 kernel written with Zig

#18

Post by dnautics »

swiley wrote: post #15
simias wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious too, I'm quite familiar with Rust and never written any Zig in my life so I went digging through the source and I find the syntax remarkably similar for the most part. The only thing that stood out is that apparently you can drop the braces for single-line `if` bodies like in C whereas Rust makes them always mandatory but I'm firmly on Rust's side on this one. The part where Rust can get really messy is w…

If you want more syntax weirdness: tab characters are illegal.

It's linted out iirc. Is it really strange to mandate that code look explicit and have no ambiguous whitespace?

Re: Hobby x86 kernel written with Zig

#19

Post by wildmusings »

guggle wrote: post #6
jackhalford wrote: post #4

Hi, author here! I've just finished writing the pre-emptive multitasking [0](only round robbin though, nothing fancy). I'm currently writing an ATA driver [1], the idea is to implement ext2. I used to do this in Rust but I switched to zig for maintainability and readability over Rust. It seems that with `comptime` I'm able to make a lot of things optimal. Overall I have to say kernel programming is _hard_ but very re…

> I used to do this in Rust but I switched to zig for maintainability and readability over Rust. Can you expand on this ? I'm asking out of curiosity because I want to learn a "system" programming language (for whatever definition there is to this term). So far I briefly tried Rust and Nim and found the former more difficult to read. I know nothing about Zig, how would you place it between these two ?

>I'm asking out of curiosity because I want to learn a "system" programming language

If you mean that you don't know any right now, just learn C. This isn't web programming, where everyone is always hopping to the latest fads. C is the lingua franca, the sine qua non of systems programming. It will be a long time before that changes. The C machine model is what everyone is working with anyway. C is small, despite some devious and fun corners of it, and mostly just exposes you to that model and way of interacting with the machine.

You can’t even appreciate the new systems languages unless you have a firm grasp of C and systems programming. They are all a response to C, addendum and proposed evolutions to it.

Re: Hobby x86 kernel written with Zig

#20

Post by blackhaz »

nicoburns wrote: post #10
guggle wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I used to do this in Rust but I switched to zig for maintainability and readability over Rust. Can you expand on this ? I'm asking out of curiosity because I want to learn a "system" programming language (for whatever definition there is to this term). So far I briefly tried Rust and Nim and found the former more difficult to read. I know nothing about Zig, how would you place it between these two ?

Zig is lower level than either (it's more like C than C++: expect to manually call 'free'on allocated values). It has a lot of nice improvments over C however, like proper arrays, no null, a module system, and proper compile time evaluation (no need for the hacky preprocessor).

May I ask why people invent new languages rather than trying to extend or improve existing ones, like C?
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