Zig feels more practical than Rust for real-world CLI tools

Post by fpoling » Tue, Sep 23, 2025, 5:12 PM UTC

jasonpeacock wrote: post #108

mattwilsonn888 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as the audience accepts the framing that ergonomics doesn't matter because it can't be quantified, the hand-waving exemplified above will confound. "This chair is guaranteed not to collapse out from under you. It might be a little less comfortable and a little heavier, but most athletic people get used to that and don't even notice!" Let's quote the article: > I’d say as it currently stands Rust has poor deve…

> produce memory safe software with a bit of discipline "a bit of discipline" is doing a lot of work here. "Just don't write (memory) bugs!" hasn't produced (memory) safe C, and they've been trying for 50yrs. The best practices have been to bolt on analyzers and strict "best practice" standards to enforce what should be part of the language. You're either writing in Rust, or you're writing in something else + using e…

Post by dminik » Tue, Sep 23, 2025, 5:14 PM UTC

jasonjmcghee wrote: post #88

qw3rty01 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly the opposite of what he’s saying, using Arc everywhere is hacking around the borrow checker , a seasoned rust developer will structure their code in a way that works with the borrow checker; Arc has a very specific use case and a seasoned rust developer will rarely use it

This is awkward. I've written a fair amount of rust. I reach for Arc frequently. I see the memory layout implications now. Do you tend to use a lot of Arenas?

Post by Ygg2 » Tue, Sep 23, 2025, 5:16 PM UTC

hu3 wrote: post #90

Galanwe wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Seasoned Rust coders don’t spend time fighting the borrow checker My experience is that what makes your statement true, is that _seasoned_ Rust developers just sprinkle `Arc` all over the place, thus effectively switching to automatic garbage collection. Because 1) statically checked memory management is too restrictive for most kinds of non trivial data structures, and 2) the hoops of lifetimes you have to go to t…

I did some quick search, not sure if this supports or denies your point: - 151 instances of "Arc https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Aservo%2Fservo+Arc%3C&type... - 5 instances of "Arc https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Arusoto%2Frusoto%20Arc%3C&... - 0 instances for "Arc https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Acgag%2Floc%20Arc%3C&type=...

Post by freeopinion » Tue, Sep 23, 2025, 5:18 PM UTC

mattwilsonn888 wrote: post #104

simonask wrote: post #21

The benefit of Zig seems to be that it allows you to keep thinking like a C programmer. That may be great, but to a certain extent it’s also just a question of habit. Seasoned Rust coders don’t spend time fighting the borrow checker - their code is already written in a way that just works. Once you’ve been using Rust for a while, you don’t have to “restructure” your code to please the borrow checker, because you’ve a…

As long as the audience accepts the framing that ergonomics doesn't matter because it can't be quantified, the hand-waving exemplified above will confound. "This chair is guaranteed not to collapse out from under you. It might be a little less comfortable and a little heavier, but most athletic people get used to that and don't even notice!" Let's quote the article: > I’d say as it currently stands Rust has poor deve…

Post by dev_l1x_be » Tue, Sep 23, 2025, 5:19 PM UTC

seivan wrote: post #73

dev_l1x_be wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't remember the last time I had any problem with the borrow checker. The junior solution is .clone(), better one is & (reference) and if you really need you can start to use . There is a mild annoyance with which function consumes what and the LLM era really helped with this. My beef is sometimes with the ways traits are implemented or how AWS implemented Errors for the their library that is just pure madness.

How did AWS mess up errors?

  while let Some(page) = object_stream.next().await {
        match page {
            // ListObjectsV2Output
            Ok(p) => {
                if let Some(contents) = p.contents {
                    all_objects.extend(contents);
                }
            }
            // SdkError
            Err(err) => {
                let raw_response = &err.raw_response();
                let service_error = &err.as_service_error();
                error!("ListObjectsV2Error: {:?} {:?}", &service_error, &raw_response);
                return Err(S3Error::Error(format!("ListObjectsV2Error: {:?}", err)));
            }
        }
    }