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Open-source Zig book

zigbook.net

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Re: Open-source Zig book

#201

Post by maxbond »

righthand wrote: post #154
DrNosferatu wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That’s fine. Write it out yourself and then ask an AI how it could be improved with a diff. Now you’ve given it double human review (once in creation then again reviewing the diff) and single AI review.

That's one review with several steps and some AI assistance. Checking your work twice is not equivalent to it having it reviewed by two people, part of reviewing your work (or the work of others) is checking multiple times and taking advantage of whatever tools are at your disposal.

Re: Open-source Zig book

#202

Post by wavemode »

poly2it wrote: post #195

> Learning Zig is not just about adding a language to your resume. It is about fundamentally changing how you think about software. I'm not sure what they expect, but to me Zig looks very much like C with a modern standard lib and slightly different syntax. This isn't groundbreaking, not a thought paradigm which should be that novel to most system engineers like for example OCaml could be. Stuff like this alienates p…

Much of the book's copy appears to have been written by AI (despite the foreword statement that none of it was), which explains the hokey overenthusiasm and exaggerations.

Re: Open-source Zig book

#203

Post by [deleted] »

xeonmc wrote: post #162
nmilo wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the first thing you see when you click the link is "Zero AI" pasted under the most obviously AI-generated copy I've ever seen. It's just an insult to our intelligence, obviously we're gonna call OP out on this. Why lie like that?

It's funny how everyone has gaslit themselves into doubting their own intuitions on the most blatant specimen where it's not just a mere whiff of the reek but an overpowering pungency assaulting the senses at every turn, forcing themselves to exclaim "the Emperor's fart smells wonderful!" “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

[deleted]

Re: Open-source Zig book

#204

Post by [deleted] »

hoshikihao wrote: post #111
amitav1 wrote: post #4

It looks cool! No experience with Zig so can't comment on the accuracy, but I will take a look at it this week. Also a bit annoying that there is no PDF version that I could download as the website is pretty slow. After taking a look at the repository ( https://github.com/zigbook/zigbook/tree/main ), each page seems to be written in AsciiDoc, so I'll take a look about compiling a PDF version later today.

If there is a PDF version, please remember to give me one. Thank you in advance.

[deleted]

Re: Open-source Zig book

#205

Post by DrNosferatu »

DrNosferatu wrote: post #115
gassi wrote: 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.

If AI is used by “fire and forget”, sure - there’s a good chance of slop.

But if you carefully review and iterate the contributions of your writers - human or otherwise - you get a quality outcome.

Re: Open-source Zig book

#206

Post by zwnow »

userbinator wrote: post #197
poly2it wrote: post #195

> Learning Zig is not just about adding a language to your resume. It is about fundamentally changing how you think about software. I'm not sure what they expect, but to me Zig looks very much like C with a modern standard lib and slightly different syntax. This isn't groundbreaking, not a thought paradigm which should be that novel to most system engineers like for example OCaml could be. Stuff like this alienates p…

For those who actually want to learn languages which are "fundamentally changing how you think about software", I'd recommend the Lisp family and APL family.

I'd also throw Erlang/Elixir out there. And I really wished Elm wasn't such a trainwreck of a project...

Re: Open-source Zig book

#207

Post by budro »

keyle wrote: post #189
Zambyte wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Early talks by Andrew explicitly leaned into the notion that "software can be perfect", which is a deviation from how most programmers view software development. Zig also encourages you to "think like a computer" (also an explicit goal stated by Andrew) even more than C does on modern machines, given things like real vectors instead of relying on auto vectorization, the lack of a standard global allocator, and the la…

I'm not sure how what you stated is different from writing highly performance C.

I think it mostly comes down to the standard library guiding you down this path explicitly. The C stdlib is quite outdated and is full of bad design that affects both performance and ergonomics. It certainly doesn't guide you down the path of smart design.

Zig _the language_ barely does any of the heavy lifting on this front. The allocator and io stories are both just stdlib interfaces. Really the language just exists to facilitate the great toolchain and stdlib. From my experience the stdlib seems to make all the right choices, and the only time it doesn't is when the API was quickly created to get things working, but hasn't been revisited since.

A great case study of the stdlib being almost perfect is SinglyLinkedList [1]. Many other languages implement it as a container, but Zig has opted to implement it as an intrusively embedded element. This might confuse a beginner who would expect SinglyLinkedList(T) instead, but it has implications surrounding allocation and it turns out that embedding it gives you a more powerful API. And of course all operations are defined with performance in mind. prepend is given to you since it's cheap, but if you want postpend you have to implement it yourself (it's a one liner, but clearly more expensive to the reader).

Little decisions add up to make the language feel great to use and genuinely impressive for learning new things.

[1] https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/std/#std.SinglyLink...

Re: Open-source Zig book

#208

Post by zwnow »

eibrahim wrote: post #99

So many comments about the AI generation part. Why does it matter? If it’s good and accurate and helpful why do you care? That’s like saying you used a calculator to calculate your equations so I can’t trust you. I am just impressed by the quality and details and approach of it all. Nicely done (PS: I know nothing about systems programming and I have been writing code for 25 years)

I value human work and I do NOT value work that has been done with heavy AI usage. Most AI things I've seen are slop, I instantly recognize AI songs for example. I just dont want anything to do with it. The uniqueness of creative work is lost with using AI.

Re: Open-source Zig book

#209

Post by gigatexal »

gamegoblin wrote: post #20
gigatexal wrote: post #8

there's no way someone made this for free, where do I donate? im gonna get so much value from this this feels like stealing

It's AI-written FWIW though maybe AI is getting to the point it can do stuff like this somewhat decently

Dang duped again

Re: Open-source Zig book

#210

Post by obviouslynotme »

poly2it wrote: post #195

> Learning Zig is not just about adding a language to your resume. It is about fundamentally changing how you think about software. I'm not sure what they expect, but to me Zig looks very much like C with a modern standard lib and slightly different syntax. This isn't groundbreaking, not a thought paradigm which should be that novel to most system engineers like for example OCaml could be. Stuff like this alienates p…

There is nothing new under the Sun. However, some languages manifest as good rewrites of older languages. Rust is that for C++. Zig is that for C.

Rust is the small, beautiful language hiding inside of Modern C++. Ownership isn't new. It's the core tenet of RAII. Rust just pulls it out of the backwards-compatible kitchen sink and builds it into the type system. Rust is worth learning just so that you can fully experience that lens of software development.

Zig is Modern C development encapsulated in a new language. Most importantly, it dodges Rust and C++'s biggest mistake, not passing allocators into containers and functions. All realtime development has to rewrite their entire standard libraries, like with the EASTL.

On top of the great standard library design, you get comptime, native build scripts, (err)defer, error sets, builtin simd, and tons of other small but important ideas. It's just a really good language that knows exactly what it is and who its audience is.

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