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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

#21

Post by sothatsit »

8s2ngy wrote: post #10

I’m sorry, but any non-trivial Zig code gives me PTSD flashbacks of C. I don’t understand who Zig is targeting: with pervasive mutability, manual allocation, and a lack of proper sum types, it feels like a step back from languages such as Rust. If it is indeed a different way to write code, one that embraces default memory unsafety, why would I choose it over C, which has decades of work behind it? Am I missing some…

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 more complicated. That makes it harder to justify using, whereas Zig is a very easy choice as an alternative to using C itself.

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

#22

Post by hardwaresofton »

jakobnissen wrote: post #17
hardwaresofton wrote: post #8

I'm not a Zig PM but the first obvious fix for the issues the OP wrote about is to write better documentation, including usage examples (the more the better, almost to a fault). Also doubles as a good time to reflect on whether the user is having to do too much. If the tradeoff was absolute performance/avoiding introducing load-bearing performance-lowering abstraction I think that goal was achieved, but DX may have g…

There is a cost to writing documentation - it takes time, which could be used to improve Zig in other areas. For code that is work-in-progress, it can make sense to not document until things are more settled. Of course documentation is good. But if you have to prioritize either a new feature, or a critical bugfix, or documentation, you often can't have it all

This is a good point, but one could make a point for the usefulness of documentation in “thinking like a user” which is a valuable exercise.

I do very much prefer moving fast though, so I get it, docs-later is obviously a very valid way of doing things.

If someone is excited about Zig and wanted to make a difference I guess it’s now obvious where they could have outsized impact!

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

#23

Post by virtualritz »

brabel wrote: post #11
hardwaresofton wrote: post #8

I'm not a Zig PM but the first obvious fix for the issues the OP wrote about is to write better documentation, including usage examples (the more the better, almost to a fault). Also doubles as a good time to reflect on whether the user is having to do too much. If the tradeoff was absolute performance/avoiding introducing load-bearing performance-lowering abstraction I think that goal was achieved, but DX may have g…

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 but yourself. Just my two c.

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

#24

Post by ksec »

hardwaresofton wrote: post #20
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.

Yeah, thinking about this attitude positively, maybe it’s a feature — if only hard core people can comfortably figure it out, you get higher quality contributions? Not trying to imply that’s an explicit goal (probably instead just a resource problem), but an observation

I think it is a trade off for between zig's development speed and documentation. It is Pre 1.0, extreme beta mode with lots of breaking changes.

Generally speaking I think it is the right trade off for now. Purely inferring from Andrew and the Zig's team online character as I don't know them in person, I think they do care a lot of DX, things like compiling speed and tools. So I think once 1.0 come I won't be surprised if it will have extremely good documentation as well.

And I would argue, writing good, simple, clear, detailed documentation is actually harder than writing code itself.

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

#25

Post by benreesman »

pjmlp wrote: post #18
benreesman wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you mean running clang-tidy as a separate build step or ASAN in a different category than other soundness checks? Compute is getting tight, lots of trends, the age of C++ is winding down gracefully. The age of Zig is emerging delibetately, and the stuff in the middle will end up in the same historical trash bin as everything else in the Altman Era: the misfortunes of losing sight of the technology.

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…

Haskell makes guarantees. Modern C++ makes predictions to within a quantifiable epsilon.

Rust makes false promises in practical situations. It invented a notion of safety that is neither well posed, nor particularly useful, nor compatible with ergonomic and efficient computing.

It's speciality is marketing and we already know the bounding box on its impact or relevance. "Vibe coding" will be a more colorful and better remembered mile marker of this lousy decade in computers than Rust, which will be an obscurity in an appendix in 100 years.

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

#26

Post by LambdaComplex »

ksec wrote: post #24
hardwaresofton wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, thinking about this attitude positively, maybe it’s a feature — if only hard core people can comfortably figure it out, you get higher quality contributions? Not trying to imply that’s an explicit goal (probably instead just a resource problem), but an observation

I think it is a trade off for between zig's development speed and documentation. It is Pre 1.0, extreme beta mode with lots of breaking changes. Generally speaking I think it is the right trade off for now. Purely inferring from Andrew and the Zig's team online character as I don't know them in person, I think they do care a lot of DX, things like compiling speed and tools. So I think once 1.0 come I won't be surpris…

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?

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

#27

Post by ksec »

LambdaComplex wrote: post #26
ksec wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is a trade off for between zig's development speed and documentation. It is Pre 1.0, extreme beta mode with lots of breaking changes. Generally speaking I think it is the right trade off for now. Purely inferring from Andrew and the Zig's team online character as I don't know them in person, I think they do care a lot of DX, things like compiling speed and tools. So I think once 1.0 come I won't be surpris…

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.

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

#28

Post by HeartofCPU »

jakobnissen wrote: post #17
hardwaresofton wrote: post #8

I'm not a Zig PM but the first obvious fix for the issues the OP wrote about is to write better documentation, including usage examples (the more the better, almost to a fault). Also doubles as a good time to reflect on whether the user is having to do too much. If the tradeoff was absolute performance/avoiding introducing load-bearing performance-lowering abstraction I think that goal was achieved, but DX may have g…

There is a cost to writing documentation - it takes time, which could be used to improve Zig in other areas. For code that is work-in-progress, it can make sense to not document until things are more settled. Of course documentation is good. But if you have to prioritize either a new feature, or a critical bugfix, or documentation, you often can't have it all

Very good point

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

#29

Post by latch »

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 re-enabled in my websocket library.

(1) https://github.com/ziglang/zig/blob/47a2f2ddae9cc47ff6df7a71...

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