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Zig Is Self-Hosted Now, What's Next?

kristoff.it

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Re: Zig Is Self-Hosted Now, What's Next?

#101

Post by throwawaymaths »

ghoward wrote: post #83
int_19h wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you expect a language as low-level as Zig is to support colorless async? It pretty much requires some kind of green threads.

I agree, and that's okay, but the problem is that many people assume Zig is colorless. I just want to dispel that notion.

Only by your definition. Colorless was always about DX, nowhere in the original article did anyone care about implementation. And this stuff does matter. I have created libraries which provides calls in both sync and async contexts to the same function and it works just fine.

Re: Zig Is Self-Hosted Now, What's Next?

#102

Post by smaddox »

jpe90 wrote: post #73
eatonphil wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of all the reasons I might imagine someone feeling like C is easier to pick up than Zig, "hardware-software knowledge to know how to architect low level code in general" does not make a ton of sense to me. In what way do you feel this was easier in C?

when i have an idea for a program i want to build, i struggle to express it in terms of structs, pointers, and C/zig’s language features. but with C, i can often find similar programs and find good examples of how to do what i want. for example right now i’m working on an SDL/opengl app with an immediate mode gui, and there’s enough code in the wild for me to pour over to understand how and why they structure their p…

On knowing how to structure low level code, I highly recommend reading Casey Muratori's blog post on Semantic Compression: https://caseymuratori.com/blog_0015

And, more generally, watching some of his (free) handmade hero video series: https://handmadehero.org/

Re: Zig Is Self-Hosted Now, What's Next?

#103

Post by kristoff_it »

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #100
kristoff_it wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Going by your own comment, you seem to not be an "early enough" adopter. That's totally fair, maybe Zig will be more interesting for you once it stabilizes more in the future.

I don’t believe this to be true. Zig is 6 years old now going by Wikipedia. In comparison I use Rust in an more extensive way than Zig for almost 20 years now. I for sure wrote more Rust in 2012 when it was ~2 years? old than Zig last year, yet I don’t remember miscompilations on that level. The same is true for my recollection of using very early D which however at this point was in an earlier life of mine and very…

I'm not sure I understand your point. Zig is clearly too unstable for your liking, by your own admission.

If your point is that Rust was more stable (and why not, even an overall better project) at the same age, then I'm happy to immediately concede the point. But that doesn't really have any influence on the main question, does it?

Re: Zig Is Self-Hosted Now, What's Next?

#104

Post by lacasito25 »

Kukumber wrote: post #86

Congrats, fast compile speed is a requirement nowadays, any language that is slow to compile puts you at a risk of not being able to fix important prod issues quick enough, hence why i use Go for my backend, i can't imagine using anything else Tests, deployment, up to restarting the service in prod, the language should empower me to not loose time I'm not talking about memory bugs, i'm talking about typo issues, API…

Single biggest reason I don't start new rust projects

Re: Zig Is Self-Hosted Now, What's Next?

#105

Post by the_mitsuhiko »

kristoff_it wrote: post #103
the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t believe this to be true. Zig is 6 years old now going by Wikipedia. In comparison I use Rust in an more extensive way than Zig for almost 20 years now. I for sure wrote more Rust in 2012 when it was ~2 years? old than Zig last year, yet I don’t remember miscompilations on that level. The same is true for my recollection of using very early D which however at this point was in an earlier life of mine and very…

I'm not sure I understand your point. Zig is clearly too unstable for your liking, by your own admission. If your point is that Rust was more stable (and why not, even an overall better project) at the same age, then I'm happy to immediately concede the point. But that doesn't really have any influence on the main question, does it?

The argument that you were making (unless I misunderstood you) is that there are more important issues for the language than correctness or appealing to early adopters to which I made the remark that this attitude is steering me away from the language.

Zig is in a weird spot because it has a similar momentum behind it than some other languages I was exited about, it has even more hype (and is very hype driven with streams and everything) yet it has from my experience with it much more stability issues. And I assume some of this comes from a relay complex compile time system that is harder to implement rigorously than some other things.

I also have to say that I find these responses unnecessarily combative.

Re: Zig Is Self-Hosted Now, What's Next?

#106

Post by rychco »

I always enjoy reading about Zig advancements. I haven't developed anything substantial in Zig yet, but I'm very optimistic about the future of the language.

If you're curious to see a large Zig codebase, two significant projects are Bun [1] and TigerBeetle [2].

[1] https://github.com/oven-sh/bun

[2] https://github.com/tigerbeetledb/tigerbeetle

Re: Zig Is Self-Hosted Now, What's Next?

#107

Post by ghoward »

throwawaymaths wrote: post #101
ghoward wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, and that's okay, but the problem is that many people assume Zig is colorless. I just want to dispel that notion.

Only by your definition. Colorless was always about DX, nowhere in the original article did anyone care about implementation. And this stuff does matter. I have created libraries which provides calls in both sync and async contexts to the same function and it works just fine.

Does developer experience not include using function pointers in Zig?

Re: Zig Is Self-Hosted Now, What's Next?

#108

Post by anonymoushn »

kristoff_it wrote: post #67
skohan wrote: post #58

I watched the linked talk by Andrew Kelly - super interesting stuff. I've played a bit with data oriented design in the context of implementing an ECS, but some of the topics he discusses take it to another level entirely, and it's very cool to see it applied, with measurable results, in a large serious project like a compiler. I have a lot of admiration for Zig, as I think it takes a very interesting approach to bei…

The choice of improving the performance of the compiler before working on the package manager was deliberate. With the new compiler you will be able to have plenty of dependencies and compilation times / memory usage will remain reasonable. The same could not be said of the bootstrap compiler. For us compilation speed is part of the main value offering of Zig.

Is this working? stage2 seems to take similar and large amounts of time to compile a non-async-using program from our project with no caches and with caches after a whitespace change.

Re: Zig Is Self-Hosted Now, What's Next?

#109

Post by anonymoushn »

ghoward wrote: post #82
kristoff_it wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really understand your crusade. I made this same observation in the past, it never satisfied you. Your blog post is full of wrong information. I tried to explain to you what was wrong when you first posted it (so you can refer to those comments, if you want), but you keep seeing this as some kind of philosophical debate, and I have no interest in having this debate. As I said to you already in the past, I jus…

> I don't really understand your crusade. Accuracy is important in the marketplace of ideas, and especially in programming. Software is too buggy already, and it would only add more bugs to have programmers not understand the languages they use. > I made this same observation in the past, it never satisfied you. Yes, you made that same observation, and I appreciate that. But as @kbd so unintentionally demonstrated, p…

> The language reference says that sync functions are turned async if they call async functions. This implies virality of async on functions, which implies that many functions are definitely async-only.

> If the compiler does something different, which it would have to if it actually makes two different versions of each function, then the language reference is wrong. Like I said, accuracy matters, so I would also like to see changes in the Zig language reference about this if that's the case.

To be clear, do you expect this function

  fn invokeFoo(a: anytype, b: anytype) @TypeOf(a) {
    return a.foo(b);
  }
to have only one representation at runtime, and for that one representation to be either async or not async?

Re: Zig Is Self-Hosted Now, What's Next?

#110

Post by anonymoushn »

ghoward wrote: post #107
throwawaymaths wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only by your definition. Colorless was always about DX, nowhere in the original article did anyone care about implementation. And this stuff does matter. I have created libraries which provides calls in both sync and async contexts to the same function and it works just fine.

Does developer experience not include using function pointers in Zig?

How is calling non-async functions via @asyncCall insufficient?
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