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Failing to Learn Zig via Advent of Code

forrestthewoods.com

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Re: Failing to Learn Zig via Advent of Code

#161

Post by llimllib »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #157
llimllib wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That complaint was weird, here's my day 7 solution in zig built in release mode: $ time zig build-exe ./a.zig -O ReleaseSmall real 0m1.728s user 0m1.544s sys 0m0.292s Which is actually slower than running the entire solution in debug mode: $ time zig run a.zig -- input.txt min 337 342641 min 470 93006301 real 0m1.138s user 0m0.789s sys 0m0.270s Totally possible that it's much slower on the dev's machine, but if he's…

Blog author here. I'm an Intel i7-8700k desktop. A few years old at this point, but quite beefy. Maybe this is a Windows issue? If I run "zig build" and then immediately run "zig build" again it still takes 3 seconds.

Totally possible! I don't have a Windows box to test on, and win does sometimes end up as a second class citizen for stuff like this.

Re: Failing to Learn Zig via Advent of Code

#162

Post by mst »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #151
NeutralForest wrote: post #22

I don't understand people recommending reading the source code to learn. Source codes can be really daunting because there are so many things going on. There can also be "tricks" using advanced language features, which defeats the purpose if you're trying to learn as a first timer. Also, "read the source" is, at least to me, an admission that there is no valid documentation 90% of the time. Reading the source of a to…

Blog author here! I read the source quite a few times. Almost every language has a dynamic array of some sort. They all do the same thing. They all have slightly different names. push / push_back / add / append. size / length / len / count. If you don't already know the name of a function then finding it is in a sea of text is very difficult and not fun. Zig ArrayList: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/blob/master/lib/s…

When I find myself in such a suboptimal situation, I tend to fall back to

    grep '^ *pub fn'
or equivalent for the language in question.

A smarter approach would probably be a code folding plugin for my editor, but I tend to keep my editing environment deliberately stupid so I can spend my cognitive complexity budget elsewhere.

(this is not to downplay your annoyance, just it seems worth mentioning that stupid problems often have stupid workarounds and I have lots of practice at being stupid ;)

Re: Failing to Learn Zig via Advent of Code

#163

Post by all2 »

snek_case wrote: post #90
llimllib wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding of the Zig's team's opinion is that Zig is not currently at a place where they want to solidify the design by doing such things as writing extensive tutorials documenting how to write it - tutorials that will need to be updated every time they make breaking changes, which they explicitly still want to do. A lot of this seems to be a mismatch between people's expectations of zig's stability and the re…

The way you handle that is by adding all your tutorials to the test of tests for the compiler. Then, whenever a breaking change happens, you have to update the tutorials for the tests to pass, which isn't difficult since you're probably only talking about minor, incremental changes.

I like this idea quite a lot. If you can write the tutorial itself in a "literate code" sort of way, the test harness should be able to consume the entire tutorial and run tests against it. Presuming, of course, that there's a way to tangle/weave using standard comments in Zig. Sounds like it could be a fun project. Could also serve as a way to auto-doc (like JavaDocs or similar using documentation generators).

Re: Failing to Learn Zig via Advent of Code

#164

Post by mst »

k__ wrote: post #158
dagmx wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've only ever really seen it in Zig communities that Rust is closer to C++ In Rust communities, it's often pitched as alternates to both, but closer to C. I suppose it's all relative, but the comparison of rust to c++ seems external

Yes, I also had the impression Rust is a C replacement.

I sort of look at it as aiming at the spot where you could write the code in C with a sprinkle of C++ features and whether to add that sprinkle or do things like hand-rolling a vtable system where you need one is a decision that will vary depending on circumstances.

Though I believe the mozilla code it's replaced was all -very- C++.

Re: Failing to Learn Zig via Advent of Code

#165

Post by nmilo »

messe wrote: post #135
nmilo wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is a case where floating-point addition is more complicated than a string concatenation? Are you referring to some obscure architecture?

One example would be an architecture on which hardware floating point is not implemented, and has to be emulated in software. This isn't uncommon in embedded, many ARM Cortex-M cores are like this AFAIK.

There's a pretty big difference between doing dynamic memory allocation for string concatenation on ALL systems, and doing software addition on some embedded processors. Even on your embedded system, floating point addition is simpler than string concatenation.

Re: Failing to Learn Zig via Advent of Code

#166

Post by rightbyte »

Comevius wrote: post #52
NeutralForest wrote: post #22

I don't understand people recommending reading the source code to learn. Source codes can be really daunting because there are so many things going on. There can also be "tricks" using advanced language features, which defeats the purpose if you're trying to learn as a first timer. Also, "read the source" is, at least to me, an admission that there is no valid documentation 90% of the time. Reading the source of a to…

The Zig std source code is easy to navigate, and it won't be documented until it is stabilized. I prefer to look up the source code either way, examples and the documentation can only get you so far.

> it won't be documented until it is stabilized

Heh ... Good one.

Re: Failing to Learn Zig via Advent of Code

#167

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

all2 wrote: post #163
snek_case wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way you handle that is by adding all your tutorials to the test of tests for the compiler. Then, whenever a breaking change happens, you have to update the tutorials for the tests to pass, which isn't difficult since you're probably only talking about minor, incremental changes.

I like this idea quite a lot. If you can write the tutorial itself in a "literate code" sort of way, the test harness should be able to consume the entire tutorial and run tests against it. Presuming, of course, that there's a way to tangle/weave using standard comments in Zig. Sounds like it could be a fun project. Could also serve as a way to auto-doc (like JavaDocs or similar using documentation generators).

Zig already does this with its current documentation and example code.

Re: Failing to Learn Zig via Advent of Code

#168

Post by messe »

nmilo wrote: post #165
messe wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One example would be an architecture on which hardware floating point is not implemented, and has to be emulated in software. This isn't uncommon in embedded, many ARM Cortex-M cores are like this AFAIK.

There's a pretty big difference between doing dynamic memory allocation for string concatenation on ALL systems, and doing software addition on some embedded processors. Even on your embedded system, floating point addition is simpler than string concatenation.

I don't know, I'd argue that in the simplest cases—a bump allocator followed by a memcpy—string concatenation can be significantly simpler.

Re: Failing to Learn Zig via Advent of Code

#169

Post by mst »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #19

As a seasoned Zig programmer, this is good information, though painful to read. A lot of the problems seem to be from a fundamental misunderstanding of Zig's philosophy and very basic things about how the language works. Possibly Zig needs more emphasis on those things in its documentation. I also have to wonder about a fundamental misalignment of thinking when someone says downloading and replacing a single .exe is…

I have a feeling that Zig is sufficiently different to most other languages in the space that developing a mental model for the way things are supposed to fit together is something that involves "aha" moments - the sort that are tricky to produce for everybody via a single piece of documentation because the thing that makes it snap together in a particular person's head varies widely between people.

Similar to the process of getting the concepts of git when you've come from other version control systems.

(I have a horrible feeling that the solution to this is mostly going to be "lots of people writing tutorials that approach it in different ways until there's at least one tutorial out there that will work for (most values of) any given person", and having been there on projects of mine I sympathise with the unsatisfyingness of this conclusion)

Re: Failing to Learn Zig via Advent of Code

#170

Post by mst »

stephc_int13 wrote: post #60

I disagree from this part: "I also think it's partially wrong. No one in the history of the world has ever been confused or upset by a + b calling a function." It depends. If this is simple math on vectors I think it can be OK but it should probably be a built-in feature of the language as this is common, solved and we all implement it the same way (for short vectors at least) But the + operator has been abused in th…

The DSL I'm currently hacking around on has ++ for string (and list) concatenation and using a -seperate- operator seems to rather help.

(I've yet to conclude if stealing ++ for this rather than preinc/postinc was a terrible mistake, so far in context it hasn't seemed to be but I'm still keeping an eye on the question)

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