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Zig as an alternative to writing unsafe Rust

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Re: Zig as an alternative to writing unsafe Rust

#21

Post by swsieber »

bpolverini wrote: post #5

I buy the premise that Zig is better if you know you will have lots of pointer arithmetic going on. Having written a fair amount of unsafe C interop code in Rust, I feel like these critiques of the ergonomics are valid. The new #![feature(strict_provenance)] adds a new layer of complexity, that, I hope, improves some of this experience while adding safety. Rust's benefits are not free. The benefits of Rust's (wonderf…

Here's one that does that: https://lib.rs/crates/inline-c

I'm not sure it's what you're looking for, but it seems like a good starting point.

As for the general thrust of your comment and the article, I agree. It'll be interesting to see what changes come to make things nicer.

Re: Zig as an alternative to writing unsafe Rust

#22

Post by likeabbas »

bpolverini wrote: post #5

I buy the premise that Zig is better if you know you will have lots of pointer arithmetic going on. Having written a fair amount of unsafe C interop code in Rust, I feel like these critiques of the ergonomics are valid. The new #![feature(strict_provenance)] adds a new layer of complexity, that, I hope, improves some of this experience while adding safety. Rust's benefits are not free. The benefits of Rust's (wonderf…

> I usually find myself wishing I could have some macro where I just write in C and have it exposed as an unsafe back in Rust.

There’s a macro for doing this with Assembly, I can imagine one could be made for C. But why wouldn’t you just write unsafe rust at that point?

Re: Zig as an alternative to writing unsafe Rust

#24

Post by ilrwbwrkhv »

ok123456 wrote: post #9

This pretty much mirrors my experience. Rust is the inverse of Perl: It makes the easy stuff hard. Writing basic data structures isn't a niche, esoteric edge case. There may be a crate that "solves" what you're trying to do. But does it rely on the std---(i.e., is it unusable for systems programming)? Is it implemented making gratuitous copies of data everywhere? Does it have a hideous interface which will then pollu…

On top of that Rust might be the ugliest modern language.

Re: Zig as an alternative to writing unsafe Rust

#25

Post by satvikpendem »

j16sdiz wrote: post #16
satvikpendem wrote: post #10

Note, this is specifically talking about unsafe Rust versus Zig. Personally unsafe does have some rough edges, I'm looking forward to seeing how the Rust team manages to make it better in the future.

UB in unsafe rust sometimes "leaks" outside the unsafe scope and cause crashing elsewhere. If rust can pair with a proof checker and let user write some correctness proof, it can be way more useful than the current borrow checker.

Are you talking about Miri, or something even stronger?

Re: Zig as an alternative to writing unsafe Rust

#26

Post by mustache_kimono »

ok123456 wrote: post #9

This pretty much mirrors my experience. Rust is the inverse of Perl: It makes the easy stuff hard. Writing basic data structures isn't a niche, esoteric edge case. There may be a crate that "solves" what you're trying to do. But does it rely on the std---(i.e., is it unusable for systems programming)? Is it implemented making gratuitous copies of data everywhere? Does it have a hideous interface which will then pollu…

> Rust is the inverse of Perl: It makes the easy stuff hard.

It's a bargain. Rust is pretty great, but it doesn't make some things easy because it would make everything else hard.

This comment is amusing, mostly because Perl is so full of tradeoffs. Do you want to write something to do some string parsing quickly? Great language, maybe. Do you want to understand what you've written later? Maybe not so great.

> Writing basic data structures isn't a niche, esoteric edge case.

Not if you're using C, because the batteries are definitely not included. Want a resizable array, or hashmap? The answer is DIY. Not in the std library. Whereas all are provided by default in Rust. Picking a basic data structure off the shelf is a pretty nice feature for most applications.

That said -- should you really need a custom implementation of a linked list, and you need to write and rewrite such an implementation all the time -- I'd understand if Rust wasn't your first choice.

> Then, there's the 'community.'

And I'm not sure anyone loves this attitude either. Keep it technical.

Re: Zig as an alternative to writing unsafe Rust

#27

Post by throwawaymaths »

j16sdiz wrote: post #16
satvikpendem wrote: post #10

Note, this is specifically talking about unsafe Rust versus Zig. Personally unsafe does have some rough edges, I'm looking forward to seeing how the Rust team manages to make it better in the future.

UB in unsafe rust sometimes "leaks" outside the unsafe scope and cause crashing elsewhere. If rust can pair with a proof checker and let user write some correctness proof, it can be way more useful than the current borrow checker.

Isn't there already a project for that?

Though I think at that point you might as well formally verify zig as a means to get memory safety, resource provenance, and data race safety.

The idea that memory safety must be baked into the type system is belief by the existence of provenance tracking macro/crate in rust since that exists specifically to track memory in unsafe; rust is basically 'discovering' a need to inventing what zig will need to invent for memory safety.

Re: Zig as an alternative to writing unsafe Rust

#28

Post by eldenring »

ok123456 wrote: post #9

This pretty much mirrors my experience. Rust is the inverse of Perl: It makes the easy stuff hard. Writing basic data structures isn't a niche, esoteric edge case. There may be a crate that "solves" what you're trying to do. But does it rely on the std---(i.e., is it unusable for systems programming)? Is it implemented making gratuitous copies of data everywhere? Does it have a hideous interface which will then pollu…

> Writing basic data structures isn't a niche, esoteric edge case

Maybe it isn't an edge case (although it should be) it also isn't `easy` in a non GC'd language, and a huge source of memory bugs.

I wouldn't say it makes the 'easy stuff hard' as much as the 'hard stuff appropriately difficult'.

Re: Zig as an alternative to writing unsafe Rust

#29

Post by coliveira »

ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #24
ok123456 wrote: post #9

This pretty much mirrors my experience. Rust is the inverse of Perl: It makes the easy stuff hard. Writing basic data structures isn't a niche, esoteric edge case. There may be a crate that "solves" what you're trying to do. But does it rely on the std---(i.e., is it unusable for systems programming)? Is it implemented making gratuitous copies of data everywhere? Does it have a hideous interface which will then pollu…

On top of that Rust might be the ugliest modern language.

Agreed, using Rust is like switching a monster (C++) for another even worse. And notice that Rust is not even a mature language, it will get much worse. I will stay with C, thank you.

Re: Zig as an alternative to writing unsafe Rust

#30

Post by [deleted] »

TheRealPomax wrote: post #19
Karellen wrote: post #13

Wait, the benchmark to find the 35th fibonacci number took 1.077s for the Zig VM vs 1.657s for the Rust VM? I realise that these VMs are going to be totally idiomatic Zig/Rust, with the most straightforward implementation possible, and little-to-no performance tuning, but even so - that's gotta be a typo, right? Or it's actually finding `fib(350)`? Or each "run" is actually finding `fib(35)` 100 (1000?) times?

No caching, every recursive call runs the entire chain from scratch. fib(35) without caching takes roughly 14 million calls to resolve.

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