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Open-source Zig book

zigbook.net

171–180 of 426 posts

Re: Open-source Zig book

#171
post #80

> The Zigbook intentionally contains no AI-generated content—it is hand-written, carefully curated, and continuously updated to reflect the latest language features and best practices. I think it's time to have a badge for non LLM content, and avoid the rest.

There is also Brainmade: https://brainmade.org/

If this gets any traction, AI bros on Twitter will put it on their generated images just out of spite.

Re: Open-source Zig book

#172

For me, personally, any new language needs to have a "why." If a new language can't convince me in 1-2 sentences why I need to learn it and how it's going to improve software development, as a whole, it's 99% bs and not worth my time. DHH does a great job of clarifying this during his podcast with Lex Friedman. The "why" is immediately clear and one can decide for themselves if it's what they're looking for. I have n…

Hmmm what about this: https://ziglang.org/learn/why_zig_rust_d_cpp/

Convincing enough?

Re: Open-source Zig book

#173
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect most developers do not know C.

C is fine C++ is where they jumped the shark

C++ explored a lot of ideas that some modern languages borrowed. C++ just had to haul along all the cruft it inherited and built up.

Re: Open-source Zig book

#174
> [Learning Zig] is about fundamentally changing how you think about software.

Learning LISP, Fortran, APL, Perl, or really any language that is different from what you’re used to, will also do this for you.

Re: Open-source Zig book

#175
post #134

>Learning Zig is not just about adding a language to your resume. It is about fundamentally changing how you think about software. Zig is just C with a marketing push. Most developers already know C.

I suspect most developers do not know C.

[deleted]

Re: Open-source Zig book

#176
post #43

It's really hard to believe this isn't AI generated, but today I was trying to use the HTTP server from std after the 0.15 changes, couldn't figure out how it's supposed to work until I've searched repos in Github. LLM's couldn't figure it out as well, they were stuck in a loop of changing/breaking things even further until they arrived at the solution of using the deprecated way. so I guess this is actually handwrit…

I've had the same experience as you with Zig. I quite love the idea of it Zig but the undocumented churn is a bit much. I wish they had auto generated docs that reflect the current state of the stdlib, at least. Even if it just listed the signatures with no commentary. I was trying to solve a simple problem but Google, the official docs, and LLMs were all out of date. I eventually found what I needed in Zig's commit…

But you can tell your LLM to just go look at the source code (after checking it out so it doesn’t try 20s github requests). Always works like a charm for me.

Re: Open-source Zig book

#178

So despite this... > The Zigbook intentionally contains no AI-generated content—it is hand-written, carefully curated, and continuously updated to reflect the latest language features and best practices. I just don't buy it. I'm 99% sure this is written by an LLM. Can the author... Convince me otherwise? > This journey begins with simplicity—the kind you encounter on the first day. By the end, you will discover a dif…

> Can the author... Convince me otherwise? Not disagreeing with you, but out of interest, how could you be convinced otherwise?

To me it's another specimen in the "demonstrating personhood" problem that predates LLMs. e.g. Someone replies to you on HN or twitter or wherever, are they a real person worth engaging with? Sometimes it'll literally be a person but their behavior is indistinguishable from a bot, that's their problem. Convincing signs of life include account age, past writing samples, and topic diversity.

Re: Open-source Zig book

#179
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why does it matter? Because AI gets things wrong, often, in ways that can be very difficult to catch. By their very nature LLMs write text that sounds plausible enough to bypass manual review (see https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2025/07/14/death-by-a-thousand-s... ), so some find it best to avoid using it at all when writing documentation.

Humans get things wrong too. Quality prose usually only becomes that after many reviews.

Fortunately, we can't just get rid of humans (right?) so we have to use them _somehow_

Re: Open-source Zig book

#180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most programming languages hide complexity from you—they abstract away memory management, mask control flow with implicit operations, and shield you from the machine beneath. This feels simple at first, but eventually you hit a wall. You need to understand why something is slow, where a crash happened, or how to squeeze every ounce of performance from your hardware. Suddenly, the abstractions that helped you get st…

These posts are getting old. I had a discussion on some other submission a couple of weeks back, where several people were arguing "it's obviously AI generated" (the style btw was completely different to this, quite a few explicitives...). When I put the the text in 5 random AI detectors the argument who except for one (which said mixed, 10% AI or so) all said 100% human I was being down voted and the argument became…

I ran the introduction chapter through Pangram [1], which is one of the most reliable AI-generated text classifiers out there [2] (with a benchmarked accuracy of 99.85% over long-form text), and it gives high confidence for it having been AI-generated. It's also very intuitively obvious if you play a lot with LLMs.

I have no problem at all reading AI-generated content if it's good, but I don't appreciate dishonesty.

[1]: https://www.pangram.com/ [2]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.14873

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