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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

#181

Post by skupig »

keyle wrote: post #65
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.

That would hurt adoption. I understand things move fast but if you want people to make the switch other than hello world, it has to be at a minimum cosy. Sending them to hell and find your way out isn't a good move long term. I tried Zig a couple of times and I got that feeling: very powerful and clever language but not really for me, I don't have the headspace, sorry. I need something I can debug after an 8 hours da…

Yeah, I had the same experience. I had an embedded project where I would need to use C libraries, and it seemed like a great excuse to try Zig, but it spat out a ton of esoteric errors I couldn't be bothered to figure out and I went back to Nim.

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

#182

Post by DrewADesign »

tempodox wrote: post #145
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?

Unsurprisingly, it’s occasionally disregarded—seemingly when you least expect it.

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

#183

Post by simonask »

uecker wrote: post #180
simonask wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, a ton of engineering hours went into making that happen.

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

#184

Post by audunw »

laserbeam wrote: post #124

I… will not update my zig side projects to 0.15.x. I can see why Andrew wanted to release this, and I can appreciate getting the new Io in people’s hands… but it’s merely a few weeks after merging massive amounts of breaking changes on readers and writers. For those working on the standard library, it’s a great thing. For one like me who casually uses zig, it feels like waiting for 0.16.0 for most of the IO dust to s…

Even Loris Cro one of the Zig core members, mentioned in a very recent interview that he’ll wait for all the fallout of the IO changes to settle before updating and continuing work on his project using Zig.

The future looks bright after that though. Both Andrew and Loris seem to think this is the last major breaking change, so I hope we can see a 1.0 not too long after. The biggest uncertainty now is what the consequences of (re-)introducing stack-less coroutines will be.

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

#185

Post by mirashii »

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…

I just wanted to clarify that I point this out to say that there was a real opportunity in this thread to try to push back on the language wars perception. To me, good community management would be taking the opportunity to say:

  * Sorry you feel that way, we try not to foster an inclusive environment that avoids language flamewars and negativity towards other languages
  * Some specific examples of policies that are enacted in community spaces towards that end (e.g. some large programming language discord servers have specific rules against low effort language bashing content and memes)
  * Take the opportunity to link back to positive things that the Zig team has said about Rust and places where folks have recommended it.
Instead, we got a shallow dismissal and redirection, which unfortunately starts to look like a pattern, especially when coming from a person who's in a leadership position in the community being discussed.

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

#186

Post by tialaramex »

ksec wrote: post #27
LambdaComplex wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My quick skim of Wikipedia may not be telling the complete story, but it says the initial release was 9 years ago (February 2016). After nearly a decade, I would hope that things would be out of "extreme beta mode," but I guess this isn't the case?

For most of its time it is simply a single person and part time project. Even to this day the team is nowhere near Rust or Go's resources.

In 2016, nine years ago, Andrew announced he'd been working on the new language "Zig" for a couple of months.

In 2018, seven years ago, Andrew announced he'd go full-time on Zig and quit his paying job to live off donations instead.

In 2020, so five years ago, Zig's 501(c)3 the ZSF was announced, to create a formal structure to hire more people in addition to the few already on Zig.

So, "most of its time" is just not true. For "most of its time" Zig was a small, largely independently funded project for multiple people, for a tiny period it was a part-time project, and for a while after that it was solo, but those weren't the majority of its existence.

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

#187

Post by Ar-Curunir »

LAC-Tech wrote: post #47
konart wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>People do systems programming in rust, but that's not really what most of the community is doing. As someone who haven't done any systems programming after university: wait, what? I was under impression that this is exactly what people where doing with Rust.(system apps, even linux kernel, no?) If not - what do they (most if the community) are doing with Rust?

Web servers, games, and applications, that sort of thing. Some people definitely do systems programming in, but it's a minority. The std library is not set up for it at all, you need something like rustix, but even that results in very unidiomatic ("unsafe") rust code. In Zig it's all in the std library by default. Because it's a systems programming language, first and foremost.

Rust is in the Linux kernel. Doesn’t get more systems than that…

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

#188

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#189

Post by tialaramex »

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…

> there could even be a cost to correctness

Notice that this cost, which proponents of Zig scoff at just like C++ programmers before them, is in fact the price of admission. "OK, we're not correct but..." is actually the end of the conversation. Everybody can already do "Not correct", we had "Not correct" without a program, so all effort expended on a program was wasted unless you're correct. Correctness isn't optional.

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

#190

Post by secondary_op »

kristoff_it wrote: post #104
pjmlp wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only, the whole handmade movement puts me off. It is the anti-intelectualism from Go culture, gone wild against C++, Rust, Swift, anything modern, or even tools, using game engines versus doing the whole computer from scratch for a game.

Zig is not really a handmade project, case in point both Andrew and I are blocked on social media by the two gods of the handmade movement (casey and john) and, according to their die hard fans, Andrew gave a talk at the last handmade conference that caused the community to split apart (the reality is a bit more complex than this, but Andrew's talk is certainly one that you wouldn't see at their new "better software"…

Unfortunately for everyone, people like you tie their entire identity and income to specific technologies, movements, or communities—becoming deeply tribal in the process. When something or someone undermines their sense of security—even with constructive criticism—they react defensively, often to the point of ignorance.

All this, combined with the fact that Zig, at best is still in beta quality and at worst amounts to a massive waste of everyone’s time, makes it unsurprising that people block you and simply refuse to engage with your loud community efforts, endless churn and crust tied to beta quality compiler.

> Zig is not really a handmade project, case in point both Andrew and I are blocked on social media by the two gods of the handmade movement (casey and john) and, according to their die hard fans, Andrew gave a talk at the last handmade conference that caused the community to split apart (the reality is a bit more complex than this, but Andrew's talk is certainly one that you wouldn't see at their new "better software" conference).

> Andrew's talk is here (second event after the two people chatting while sitting on chairs): https://handmadecities.com/media/seattle-2024/hms-day-one/

> Here you can see a particularly funny (but also sad) reaction by one of these people https://drive.proton.me/urls/MB1EB4EF34#YZdvmAvBFp1C

Regarding the links you posted:

In the first, at 2:30:40, Andrew Kelly publicly calls out a specific author of a competing technology in exaggerated, caricatured, and fabricated context.

In the second video, yet another author of a yet another competing technology directly points out this unapologetic and concerning behavior on Andrew Kelly’s part.

And now you—“VP of Community @ Zig Software Foundation”—assert your “righteous” stance by sharing these videos, while ironically pointing out that some of those same individuals (of competing technologies fame) block you on social media.

Too bad that doing your job probably means being as loud and visible online as possible to spread the molecules of Zig no matter what.

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