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How I turned Zig into my favorite language to write network programs in

lalinsky.com

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Re: How I turned Zig into my favorite language to write network programs in

#31

Post by aidenn0 »

lukaslalinsky wrote: post #27
tombert wrote: post #20

I really need to play with Zig. I got really into Rust a few months ago, and I was actually extremely impressed by Tokio, so if this library also gives me Go-style concurrency without having to rely on a garbage collector, then I am likely to enjoy it.

Go has tricks that you can't replicate elsewhere, things like infinitely growable stacks, that's only possible thanks to the garbage collector. But I did enjoy working on this, I'm continually impressed with Zig for how nice high-level looking APIs are possible in such a low-level language.

Pre-1.0 Rust used to have infinitely growing stacks, but they abandoned it due to (among other things) performance reasons (IIRC the stacks were not collected with Rust's GC[1], but rather on return; the deepest function calls may happen in tight loops, and if you are allocating and freeing the stack in a tight loop, oops!)

1: Yes, pre-1.0 Rust had a garbage collector.

Re: How I turned Zig into my favorite language to write network programs in

#32

Post by tonyhart7 »

samtheprogram wrote: post #28
tonyhart7 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Bun is 100% fine in production. And you should be using it instead of transpiling TypeScript unless there’s some other barrier to using it.

I am not trying to dunk on this project

all of these project is great but we cant ignore that Zig is not enter phase where we can guarantee stable API compability

Re: How I turned Zig into my favorite language to write network programs in

#33

Post by laserbeam »

quantummagic wrote: post #6

Isn't this a bad time to be embracing Zig? It's currently going through an intrusive upheaval of its I/O model. My impression is that it was going to take a few years for things to shake out. Is that wrong?

Kind of is a bad idea. Even the author’s library is not using the latest zig IO features and is planning for big changes with 0.16. From the readme of the repo:

> Additionally, when Zig 0.16 is released with the std.Io interface, I will implement that as well, allowing you to use the entire standard library with this runtime.

Unrelated to this library, I plan to do lots of IO with Zig and will wait for 0.16. Your intuition may decide otherwise and that’s ok.

Re: How I turned Zig into my favorite language to write network programs in

#34

Post by vlovich123 »

aidenn0 wrote: post #30

I am still mystified as to why callback-based async seems to have become the standard. What this and e.g. libtask[1] do seems so much cleaner to me. The Rust folks adopted async with callbacks, and they were essentially starting from scratch so had no need to do it that way, and they are smarter than I (both individually and collectively) so I'm sure they have a reason; I just don't know what it is. 1: https://swtch.…

The research Microsoft engineers did on stackful vs stackless coroutines for the c++ standard I think swayed this as “the way” to implement it for something targeting a systems level - significantly less memory overhead (you only pay for what you use) and offload the implementation details of the executor (lots of different design choices that can be made).

Re: How I turned Zig into my favorite language to write network programs in

#36

Post by lukaslalinsky »

quantummagic wrote: post #6

Isn't this a bad time to be embracing Zig? It's currently going through an intrusive upheaval of its I/O model. My impression is that it was going to take a few years for things to shake out. Is that wrong?

It really depends on what you are doing, but if it's something related to I/O and you embrace the buffered reader/writer interfaces introduced in Zig 0.15, I think not much is going to change. You might need changes on how you get those interfaces, but the core of your code is unchanged.

Re: How I turned Zig into my favorite language to write network programs in

#37

Post by loeg »

aidenn0 wrote: post #30

I am still mystified as to why callback-based async seems to have become the standard. What this and e.g. libtask[1] do seems so much cleaner to me. The Rust folks adopted async with callbacks, and they were essentially starting from scratch so had no need to do it that way, and they are smarter than I (both individually and collectively) so I'm sure they have a reason; I just don't know what it is. 1: https://swtch.…

The thread stack for something like libtask is ambiguously sized and often really large relative to like, formalized async state.

Re: How I turned Zig into my favorite language to write network programs in

#38

Post by dualogy »

quantummagic wrote: post #6

Isn't this a bad time to be embracing Zig? It's currently going through an intrusive upheaval of its I/O model. My impression is that it was going to take a few years for things to shake out. Is that wrong?

> My impression is that it was going to take a few years for things to shake out. Is that wrong?

I had that very impression in early 2020 after some months of Zigging (and being burned by constant breaking changes), and left, deciding "I'll check it out again in a few years."

I had some intuition it might be one of these forever-refactoring eternal-tinker-and-rewrite fests and here I am 5 years later, still lurking for that 1.0 from the sidelines, while staying in Go or C depending on the nature of the thing at hand.

That's not to say it'll never get there, it's a vibrant project prioritizing making the best design decisions rather than mere Shipping Asap. For a C-replacement that's the right spirit, in principle. But whether there's inbuilt immunity to engineers falling prey to their forever-refine-and-resculpt I can't tell. I find it a great project to wait for leisurely (=

Re: How I turned Zig into my favorite language to write network programs in

#39

Post by loeg »

messe wrote: post #21
mananaysiempre wrote: post #8

> Context switching is virtually free, comparable to a function call. If you’re counting that low, then you need to count carefully. A coroutine switch, however well implemented, inevitably breaks the branch predictor’s idea of your return stack, but the effect of mispredicted returns will be smeared over the target coroutine’s execution rather than concentrated at the point of the switch. (Similar issues exist with…

> I’m actually not sure if Zig’s async design even uses hardware call/return pairs Zig no longer has async in the language (and hasn't for quite some time). The OP implemented task switching in user-space.

Even so. You're talking about storing and loading at least ~16 8-byte registers, including the instruction pointer which is essentially a jump. Even to L1 that takes some time; more than a simple function call (jump + pushed return address).

Re: How I turned Zig into my favorite language to write network programs in

#40

Post by oaiey »

aidenn0 wrote: post #30

I am still mystified as to why callback-based async seems to have become the standard. What this and e.g. libtask[1] do seems so much cleaner to me. The Rust folks adopted async with callbacks, and they were essentially starting from scratch so had no need to do it that way, and they are smarter than I (both individually and collectively) so I'm sure they have a reason; I just don't know what it is. 1: https://swtch.…

I think it started with an interrupt. And less abstraction often wins.
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