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I'm too dumb for Zig's new IO interface

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Re: I'm too dumb for Zig's new IO interface

#141

Post by DannyBee »

hardwaresofton wrote: post #20
brabel wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re not familiar with Zig’s culture, I guess. Complain about the lack of documentation and be prepared for the flood of “just read the stdlib code” helpful comments by pretty much everyone who writes Zig right now. Because most APIs are just as hard to use as in this post (check things like HTTP and even basic file system operations) only the strongest survive.

Yeah, thinking about this attitude positively, maybe it’s a feature — if only hard core people can comfortably figure it out, you get higher quality contributions? Not trying to imply that’s an explicit goal (probably instead just a resource problem), but an observation

More likely you get people who have the same groupthink, which has both ups and downs. Their contribution quality is probably not that well correlated.

Re: I'm too dumb for Zig's new IO interface

#142

Post by omgtehlion »

Galanwe wrote: post #5

The Zig's language is really good, but the standard library is really a big work in progress, constantly shifting, missing a lot of bits, overly abstracted at some places and too low level at other places. I would say just stay away from the standard library for now and use your OS API, unless you're willing to be a beta tester.

Yup, exactly how I use zig most of the time: just use good old OS apis, it is very easy to use cImports, when I'm too lazy to create zig definitions )

Re: I'm too dumb for Zig's new IO interface

#143

Post by 0x696C6961 »

dns_snek wrote: post #126
0x696C6961 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Writing good docs/examples takes a lot of effort. It would be a waste considering the amount of churn that happens in zig at this point.

That's a false dichotomy, I'll take minimal bitrotten docs in a community wiki over no docs. There's no excuse not to at least have a stub that says "these features are evolving quickly but here are 10 open source projects that should serve as good references". Something - anything. As much as I like Zig, I dread returning to it after a few months of being out of the loop.

It's not a false dichotomy, it's a bandwidth issue. I'd rather the core team focus on stuff like incremental compilation.

Re: I'm too dumb for Zig's new IO interface

#144

Post by crote »

jakobnissen wrote: post #17
hardwaresofton wrote: post #8

I'm not a Zig PM but the first obvious fix for the issues the OP wrote about is to write better documentation, including usage examples (the more the better, almost to a fault). Also doubles as a good time to reflect on whether the user is having to do too much. If the tradeoff was absolute performance/avoiding introducing load-bearing performance-lowering abstraction I think that goal was achieved, but DX may have g…

There is a cost to writing documentation - it takes time, which could be used to improve Zig in other areas. For code that is work-in-progress, it can make sense to not document until things are more settled. Of course documentation is good. But if you have to prioritize either a new feature, or a critical bugfix, or documentation, you often can't have it all

On the other hand, not writing documentation also has a cost.

Code is rarely written from start to finish in a single session. Would you rather spend 5 minutes before you do a git commit to write down some very basic documentation, or spend an hour rediscovering it when you pick up development two weeks later?

Nobody is expecting extensive and well-polished documentation here, but is a "Flags X, Y, and Z are mandatory, buffer A is required: I tested with 10MB, smaller might be fine too" really too much to ask for?

Is the time you saved by not writing that one line worth someone else spending several hours figuring out how to do a "hello world"?

Re: I'm too dumb for Zig's new IO interface

#145

Post by tempodox »

latch wrote: post #29

Author here. I finally got it working. I had to flush both the encrypted writer and then the stream writer. There was also some issues with reading. Streaming works, but it'll always return 0 on the first read because Writer.Fixed doesn't implement sendFile, and thus after the first call, it internally switches from streaming mode to reading mode (1) and then things magically work. Currently trying to get compression…

Whatever happened to the principle of least surprise?

Re: I'm too dumb for Zig's new IO interface

#146

Post by 0x696C6961 »

DannyBee wrote: post #140
0x696C6961 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Writing good docs/examples takes a lot of effort. It would be a waste considering the amount of churn that happens in zig at this point.

Only in a world where features are made without thought. Documentation is not just for your users. Writing the development documentation helps you make better features in the first place. The zig users on this thread seem to not understand this, and all seem to think documentation is a thing you write later for users when everything settles down. Or is somehow otherwise "in the way" of feature and API development spe…

You're conflating specs/RFCs with end-user documentation.

Re: I'm too dumb for Zig's new IO interface

#147

Post by geon »

viraptor wrote: post #98
rjh29 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pre-1.0 beta. Nothing has been 'released' yet .

That's ok. "It's an unstable, experimental, early version." is a valid explanation. GP put the lack of docs and the new interface together, which... isn't an excuse.

That Zig is pre 1.0 is a given. Not sure how you could take my statement as ”even post 1.0 releases don’t need docs.”

Re: I'm too dumb for Zig's new IO interface

#148

Post by geon »

speed_spread wrote: post #134
geon wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can’t expect documentation this early. The new interface was just released.

You absolutely should expect documentation this early. The chances of quality documentation being added as an afterthought are not good. If proper documentation isn't part of the original goals after that time, things aren't looking well. Nobody is going to come and just write docs for months.

Zig is open source, so the docs are pretty much a wiki. You can spend 5 minutes.

Re: I'm too dumb for Zig's new IO interface

#149

Post by pjmlp »

pron wrote: post #138
pjmlp wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean those and other ones, we already have enough unsafe languages as it is. The age of C++ is going great, despite all its warts and unsafety, thanks to compiler frameworks like GCC and LLVM, games industry, GPGPU and Khronos APIs. Even if C++ loses everywhere else, it has enough industry mindshare to keep being relevant. Same applies to C, in the context of UNIX clones, POSIX, Khronos, embedded. Being like Modula…

> we already have enough unsafe languages as it is By that logic, we definitely have enough safe languages as it is, as there are many more. But this safe/unsafe dichotomy is silly, and is coloured by languages that are unsafe in some particular ways. 1. Memory safety is important because memory-safety violations are a common cause of dangerous security vulnerabilities. But once you remove out-of-bounds access, as Zi…

We actually already have enough safe languages as well.

I am a firm beliver in the vision of Xerox PARC for computing, and think the only reason we aren't yet there are politics, lack of funding from management for doing the right thing pushing them into the market, always looking to shareholders and the next quarter, and naturally programming language religion.

We were already on the right direction with languages like Modula-3 and Active Oberon, following up on Cedar influences, unfortunately that isn't how the industry goes.

Re: I'm too dumb for Zig's new IO interface

#150

Post by throwawaymaths »

virtualritz wrote: post #23
brabel wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re not familiar with Zig’s culture, I guess. Complain about the lack of documentation and be prepared for the flood of “just read the stdlib code” helpful comments by pretty much everyone who writes Zig right now. Because most APIs are just as hard to use as in this post (check things like HTTP and even basic file system operations) only the strongest survive.

I do not think this is a viable excuse any more. I am just editing docs now that Claude Code writes for me. I am fanatic about developer docs (and I guess an exception as I love writing them) but with a set of concise instructions for CC and some writing style examples I get 90% there, sometimes 99%. If you believe you don't have time for the last 1--10% you should not be in charge of writing any API used by anyone b…

It's just not reasonable to expect volunteers to write eloquent documentation when it's likely it will just get flushed
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