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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

#171

Post by ioasuncvinvaer »

throwawaymaths wrote: post #157
kelnos wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This really struck a chord with me. Writing documentation is an act of explaining something to others. Explaining something to others is a great way to test your own understanding. If it's hard to explain to someone else, then maybe it's the wrong design. If you don't through that exercise, you're much more likely to build confusing, difficult-to-use APIs.

> you're much more likely to build confusing, difficult-to-use APIs. have not found this to be the case with zig in general. you could easily make the opposite argument, that documenting things (especially quirks) can give you license to build confusing APIs.

I think some documentation and a handful of examples would have helped the author of the article. How is the experience when porting to the new standard library improved by not including documentation?

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

#172

Post by mirashii »

kristoff_it wrote: post #99
littlestymaar wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key problem with Zig nowadays is how much of its community and adoption is driven by anti-Rust sentiment. As a result, while Rust puts beginner onboarding and documentation at the center of its culture, as opposed to the “C neckbeard”'s culture, Zig is going the other way around. (Loris Cro being a key community figure isn't helping in any way, and it's a good remainder that if you don't clear up your community f…

> The key problem with Zig nowadays is how much of its community and adoption is driven by anti-Rust sentiment. As a result, while Rust puts beginner onboarding and documentation at the center of its culture, as opposed to the “C neckbeard”'s culture, Zig is going the other way around. Maybe, or maybe the fact that Zig is a small independent project with limited resources has also something to do with it, and this ki…

> Maybe, or maybe the fact that Zig is a small independent project with limited resources has also something to do with it

Or, maybe it's this kind of redirection and evidence of a victim complex. Part of the reason that there's a patina of anti-Rust sentiment includes the dismissive attitude and swipes you, a the VP of Community at the Zig Software Foundation, take towards Rust and Rust developers by writing about topics you aren't involved in and don't have a solid grasp of.

https://kristoff.it/blog/raii-rust-linux/ https://lobste.rs/s/hxerht/raii_rust_linux_drama#c_gbn1q8

Or similarly, comments like this one in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=44994749

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

#174

Post by 0x696C6961 »

dns_snek wrote: post #160
0x696C6961 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

"No documentation" and "Core devs 'wasting' time on writing high quality documentation" aren't the only two options, that's what a false dichotomy means. Other options include but are not limited to providing minimal, low effort examples, high-level overview, linking to projects using these features, linking to relevant tests, commits, or source code, setting up an official community wiki and encouraging people to co…

"No documentation" was never presented as an option. Documentation exists. By treating "insufficient docs" as "no docs", you're the one making the false equivalency.

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

#175

Post by messe »

adwn wrote: post #166
throwawaymaths wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why would you care about these kinds of micro-optimizations it turns out that compiler speed is bound by a bunch of things, and it's death by a thousand cuts. If you have a slow compiler, and it takes forever to compile your compiler, your language becomes scelerotic, no one wants to make changes, and your language gets stuck in shitty choices. > Because a compiler is not some simple CLI tool with a fixed upper bou…

You're losing sight of the full picture: This "optimization" was such a hindrance that they had to rewrite the compiler before they could work on the ecosystem of their new language. From kristoff_it's comment [1]: > When I first joined the Zig project, Zig was still using the bootstrap compiler written in C++ that would not free memory (it took more than 4GB to compile the Zig compiler). Some people at the time were…

> they had to rewrite the compiler before they could work on the ecosystem of their new language.

I think you may have missed that the intention was always to rewrite the compiler to become self hosted. Improving the C++ implementation any more would've been pointless optimization.

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

#176

Post by throwawaymaths »

steveklabnik wrote: post #170
throwawaymaths wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

doesn't the llvm coroutines require c's malloc? this is part of the reason why zig scrapped async. i would suspect Rust's async/await does allocate behind your back

Rust does not. It also doesn’t use LLVM’s coroutines.

thanks for clarifying

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

#177

Post by littlestymaar »

mirashii wrote: post #172
kristoff_it wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The key problem with Zig nowadays is how much of its community and adoption is driven by anti-Rust sentiment. As a result, while Rust puts beginner onboarding and documentation at the center of its culture, as opposed to the “C neckbeard”'s culture, Zig is going the other way around. Maybe, or maybe the fact that Zig is a small independent project with limited resources has also something to do with it, and this ki…

> Maybe, or maybe the fact that Zig is a small independent project with limited resources has also something to do with it Or, maybe it's this kind of redirection and evidence of a victim complex. Part of the reason that there's a patina of anti-Rust sentiment includes the dismissive attitude and swipes you, a the VP of Community at the Zig Software Foundation, take towards Rust and Rust developers by writing about t…

Loris really isn't a person worth engaging with honestly, don't waste your time.

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

#178

Post by noobermin »

Having seen the posts about the new IO interface, I decided to steer clear from Zig. Looks like that fortuitious instinct was proven valid as this looks more and more like the verbosity from pre C++11 for different reasons but with a similar result.

This pattern (new language evolves to be as complex as the languages it was supposed to replace) seems familiar.

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

#179

Post by hu3 »

josephg wrote: post #137
j1elo wrote: post #136

> To convert the Stream.Reader to an std.Io.Reader, we need to call its interface() method. To get a std.io.Writer from an Stream.Writer, we need the address of its &interface field. This doesn't seem particularly consistent. That made me think of how that change would be received in Go (probably would be discarded). They way they approach changes in extremely deep analysis and taking as much time as it needs to avoi…

Rust is the same. It grinds my goat a little how many useful features are implemented - but only available in nightly rust. Things like generators. But when rust ships features to stable, they’re usually pretty well thought through. I’m impatient. But the rust language & compiler teams probably have the right idea.

I beg to differ. Rust async implementation is contentious and criticized often. Sometimes you just miss the mark despite pondering about it for a while. Same with Go.

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

#180

Post by uecker »

simonask wrote: post #75
sothatsit wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love Zig precisely because it is so similar to C. Honestly, if you don't like C, I can totally understand why you wouldn't like Zig. But I love C, and I love Zig. Zig has become my go-to for projects where I would previously have reached for C, largely because Zig has such good compatibility with other C projects. Rust, on the other hand, is a completely different beast. It is very different from C, and it is far m…

C is entirely as complicated as Rust, if your goal is to write correct software that doesn't crash all the time. It's only a syntactically simple language. Actually making anything interesting with it is _not_ simple.

Most software I use daily on my Linux system is actually written in C and I can't remember any of it crashing in the last decade or so.
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