Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

My Software North Star

kristoff.it

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–166 of 166 posts

Re: My Software North Star

#161

Post by Ygg2 »

zaphirplane wrote: post #158
Ygg2 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://xkcd.com/605/ No one can predict the future least of all humble extrapolation line.

Everything we do is about anticipation, from cooking to walking to driving. You maybe thinking 100% or nothing

Yeah, but those (cooking, walking) rely on prior experiences.

We don't have prior experiences that can tell us with certainty that LLMs will or will not replace humans entirely.

Projecting that LLMs will become a singularity is the same as saying processor's clock speed will double every year. They do double, they don't.

Sun will always rise in the east until it engulfs us.

Re: My Software North Star

#162

Post by nsvd2 »

liampulles wrote: post #156
flooow wrote: post #7

I imagine it's a difficult time to be a Zig developer. In the near term, Bun choosing to switch from Zig to Rust specifically to fix all the memory errors seems to have done the Zig community some psychological damage. But more significantly, in the medium term it looks likely that AI coding is going to overtake the industry before Zig gets properly established. And it is going to be very hard to justify choosing Zig…

There are performance reasons to handle memory allocation manually and tactically. This is why languages which deal with memory manually are not going anywhere. Whether Zig will become dominant in that space remains to be seen.

While true, that doesn't distinguish between Zig and Rust, as both allow you to manually allocate memory and create custom data structures.

Re: My Software North Star

#163

Post by dnautics »

rirze wrote: post #160
dnautics wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

claude and codex are pretty quick to figure out "oh that's not a thing anymore" and figure out what they need to do? i did a 0.15 -> 0.16 port of this library and most of it the LLM did https://github.com/E-xyza/zigler

I agree, when agents realize they're using old Zig semantics, they will adapt. Doesn't help the training sets that Zig changes frequently though.

nah. zig doesn't have weird macros/dsls and most zig authors are reasonably good about sticking to conventions. easiest thing to do is to put a "reminder here is changelog" in the agents file

Re: My Software North Star

#164

Post by witx »

onion2k wrote: post #44
0815beck wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what do you mean "there is no way to distinguish a feature from a bug"? of course there is

A bug is a feature that does what the code says it should do, not what the requirements say it should do (or shouldn't in the case of most bugs). When you understand that there's no difference between a bug and a feature in the code . They're both just code. It's a correct statement, but when you're talking about memory safe languages it's true that memory safety helps you avoid writing code that doesn't do what you…

> A bug is a feature that does what the code says it should do, not what the requirements say it should do (or shouldn't in the case of most bugs). When you understand that there's no difference between a bug and a feature in the code. They're both just code.

You're twisting very hard the definitions here. A bug is a behaviour different than the one intended, it is not tied to code whatsoever. You can have bugs "in the code" that happen because of faulty hardware, or a solar flare.

Unless you work in an industry where solar flares should be taken into consideration, the code and requirement can match and you still have the (protential) bug

Re: My Software North Star

#165

Post by liampulles »

nsvd2 wrote: post #162
liampulles wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are performance reasons to handle memory allocation manually and tactically. This is why languages which deal with memory manually are not going anywhere. Whether Zig will become dominant in that space remains to be seen.

While true, that doesn't distinguish between Zig and Rust, as both allow you to manually allocate memory and create custom data structures.

Ok, but doing manual memory management in Rust is a bit like digging a ditch with a spoon. I get that its technically possible, that does not mean it should be done outside the most exceptional of circumstances.

Re: My Software North Star

#166

Post by sunshowers »

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #121
oytis wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Like unsafe Rust, but more convenient to use" is basically every imperative language around there, I still don't understand the specific niche that Zig intended to fill

It's weird to talk about "basically every" language, when you have exactly three mature systems languages: C, C++, Rust. C is from the 70s, C++ is an incoherent kludge on top of it, and Rust has a miserable DX (especially when actually used as a systems language instead of relying on pulling in 500 cargo dependencies that handle the unsafe code for you). Nothing else is used for serious systems programming. You don't…

I look at people saying things like "Rust has a miserable DX" and I wonder whether I live on a different planet from them.
Post reply on HN