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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

#321

Post by bnolsen »

littlestymaar wrote: post #71
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.

The key problem with Zig nowadays is how much of its community and adoption is driven by anti-Rust sentiment. As a result, while Rust puts beginner onboarding and documentation at the center of its culture, as opposed to the “C neckbeard”'s culture, Zig is going the other way around. (Loris Cro being a key community figure isn't helping in any way, and it's a good remainder that if you don't clear up your community f…

The anti rust sentiment in large part is dissatisfaction with rust itself. Ziglang.org lists 3 principles of zig: no hidden control flow, no hidden memory allocations, no macros. This is not anti rust for the sake of being anti rust, this is anti lots of popular languages, and I personally like it.

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

#322

Post by sothatsit »

uecker wrote: post #314
sothatsit wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Easier said than done. In the real-world, in real projects, sustaining zero memory-safety bugs in large C codebases is exceedingly rare. Microsoft and Chrome have each reported that ~70% of their serious security bugs are memory‑safety issues, and curl attributes about 40% of its vulnerabilities to using C. Memory safety problems are really hard to avoid in practice in large C codebases. You can't just blame develope…

The real-world is complex with many trade-offs. The real question if in a 1:1 comparable situation and using similar efforts, you could achieve good memory safety in C. I believe this to be the case. I think the statistics we have seen are highly biased and partially misleading and the actual differences in the number of CVEs have many reasons (including legacy code, priorities, usage scnarious, culture etc). I mean,…

From what I'm reading in your response, we agree.

When a project grows in complexity, age, number of contributors, poor review culture, complex requirements, or any of 101 different things that can make a project hard, then it is hard to avoid memory safety bugs. This covers like 99% of non-trivial projects.

If your software projects are very simple, then it is easy to write simple C programs that do the job well. This is what I said before. If your project is simple, boring, and straight-forward, using C is just fine. It is complex projects where the use of C can become a problem (and complexity can sneak up on you from an unbelievable number of sources).

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

#323

Post by littlestymaar »

bnolsen wrote: post #321
littlestymaar wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key problem with Zig nowadays is how much of its community and adoption is driven by anti-Rust sentiment. As a result, while Rust puts beginner onboarding and documentation at the center of its culture, as opposed to the “C neckbeard”'s culture, Zig is going the other way around. (Loris Cro being a key community figure isn't helping in any way, and it's a good remainder that if you don't clear up your community f…

The anti rust sentiment in large part is dissatisfaction with rust itself. Ziglang.org lists 3 principles of zig: no hidden control flow, no hidden memory allocations, no macros. This is not anti rust for the sake of being anti rust, this is anti lots of popular languages, and I personally like it.

That isn't “anti Rust” at all, it's just a different set of trade offs, and it's fine that it attracts developers who don't like the set of trade offs Rust make.

What's not very good are the people who don't like Rust, who are uneasy with Rust is eating the system programming world, and are now pushing Zig as the champion of the resistance about Rust.

It happens a lot, unfortunately.

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

#324

Post by baranul »

mirashii wrote: post #172
kristoff_it wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The key problem with Zig nowadays is how much of its community and adoption is driven by anti-Rust sentiment. As a result, while Rust puts beginner onboarding and documentation at the center of its culture, as opposed to the “C neckbeard”'s culture, Zig is going the other way around. Maybe, or maybe the fact that Zig is a small independent project with limited resources has also something to do with it, and this ki…

> Maybe, or maybe the fact that Zig is a small independent project with limited resources has also something to do with it Or, maybe it's this kind of redirection and evidence of a victim complex. Part of the reason that there's a patina of anti-Rust sentiment includes the dismissive attitude and swipes you, a the VP of Community at the Zig Software Foundation, take towards Rust and Rust developers by writing about t…

This Zig victim complex, smells of clear hypocrisy, as can be easily seen by their swipes and harassment of other programming languages, like V (Vlang).

It reflects poorly on any leadership engaging in that kind of bad and unprofessional behavior, and it eventually backfires on any project or person. People eventually notice it and figure out the foul things that have been or is being done, then demand accountability or walk away from the toxicity.

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

#325

Post by cztomsik »

littlestymaar wrote: post #317
cztomsik wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NOBODY should EVER be perma-banned just because you disagree with them! What the hell?

I don't know hat makes you think I'm talking about disagreement, but that's not what I'm talking about, if one cannot help insulting people on a forum, then what they deserve is a ban. First a temporary one, then if they still can't behave then a permanent one. Loris is a bully, that's the problem, not his opinions.

Do you have any links? It's a bold statement, and I have not personally noticed anything like that (but I am also not actively following him anywhere)

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

#326

Post by tialaramex »

pron wrote: post #313
zozbot234 wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When you claim some technique would give a corporation a significant competitive edge, and yet most corporations don't take it (at least not for most projects), then that is evidence against that claim because usually companies are highly motivated to gain an advantage.' Corporations will generally want to optimize for ease of development and general ecosystem maturity. Rust is at a clear disadvantage at least wrt.…

But C++ is over 40 years old, and Java et al. displaced it in like five minutes. And that the footprint savings aren't worth much is pretty much the point. If you get 1GB/core and you use less, then you can't run more programs on the machine. The machine is exhausted when the first of RAM/CPU is, not when both are.

Nah. I'm an old man. I remember when Java 1.0 shipped. It got relatively little initial enterprise adoption considering it was from Sun who had a lot of enterprise contracts. Traction took years and was often aligned with adoption of Tim's crap hypermedia system, the "World Wide Web" which he'd created years prior but was just beginning to intrude into normal people's lives by the end of the 1990s.

A big factor is that Java was the entire ecosystem, you're getting a programming language (which is pretty good), a novel virtual machine (most of their ideas fell through but the basic thing is fine), dedicated hardware (mostly now forgotten), a component architecture, and a set of tools for them.

You're still on this 1GB/core thing which is the wrong end of the scale in two senses. Firstly, I've worked on systems where we'd want 1TB/core and so today that means you're buying a lot of CPU performance you don't need to get enough RAM because as you say, that machine is "exhausted" anyway.

But more importantly the scale for big products isn't dictated by RAM or CPU it's dictated by service provision, and at large scale that's just linear. Twice as much provision, twice the cost. Avoiding a GC can let you slash that cost. Cutting a $1M annual bill in half would justify hiring a Rust programmer though likely not a whole team. Cutting a $1Bn annual bill in half - which is much more like what Microsoft are spending on O365 - is obviously worth hiring a team.

It's not instant. GC tuning is basically instant. RIIR might take three, five, even ten years. So don't expect results tomorrow afternoon.

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

#327

Post by pron »

tialaramex wrote: post #326
pron wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But C++ is over 40 years old, and Java et al. displaced it in like five minutes. And that the footprint savings aren't worth much is pretty much the point. If you get 1GB/core and you use less, then you can't run more programs on the machine. The machine is exhausted when the first of RAM/CPU is, not when both are.

Nah. I'm an old man. I remember when Java 1.0 shipped. It got relatively little initial enterprise adoption considering it was from Sun who had a lot of enterprise contracts. Traction took years and was often aligned with adoption of Tim's crap hypermedia system, the "World Wide Web" which he'd created years prior but was just beginning to intrude into normal people's lives by the end of the 1990s. A big factor is th…

Rust is as old now as Java was when JDK 6 came out. But it's not just Java. Look at Fortran, C, C++, JS, C#, PHP, Ruby, Go, and even the late-bloomer Python - no popular language had an adoption rate as low as Rust at its rather advanced age. The trend just isn't there. It may well be that low-level programming will slowly shift to Rust an Zig, but there is no indication that low level programming as a whole isn't continuing its decline (in use, not importance).

> Avoiding a GC can let you slash that cost

But it doesn't, because RAM isn't the bottleneck in the vast majority of cases. It doesn't matter how linear costs are if RAM isn't the thing that's exhausted. That's why the use of manual memory management had been declining for decades.

At 1TB per core things still don't change because GC no longer has a high footprint cost in the old gen. You may use 15x RAM for the first 50 MB, but the overhead for the second GB is very small, thanks to the generational hypothesis: the older an object is, the less frequently it is allocated. The cost of a moving-tracing GC is propprtional to allocation-rate * live-set / heap-size per generation. When the live set is large, the allocation rate in that generation is low, which means that the heap size premium is also low.

> So don't expect results tomorrow afternoon.

Manual memory management is the older option, and it's been in decline for decades precisely because the savings in costs go in the other direction (not in all situations, but in most) due to the economics of RAM costs vs CPU costs. Without a marked change in the economics, the trend won't reverse even in another 50 years.

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

#328

Post by uecker »

sothatsit wrote: post #322
uecker wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real-world is complex with many trade-offs. The real question if in a 1:1 comparable situation and using similar efforts, you could achieve good memory safety in C. I believe this to be the case. I think the statistics we have seen are highly biased and partially misleading and the actual differences in the number of CVEs have many reasons (including legacy code, priorities, usage scnarious, culture etc). I mean,…

From what I'm reading in your response, we agree. When a project grows in complexity, age, number of contributors, poor review culture, complex requirements, or any of 101 different things that can make a project hard, then it is hard to avoid memory safety bugs. This covers like 99% of non-trivial projects. If your software projects are very simple, then it is easy to write simple C programs that do the job well. Th…

I would not say we agree with respect to your last point. I think also very complex C programs can be made memory safe, when this is a design goal from the beginning. That complexity can make this harder is true also for Rust, where people then often use unsafe, or, alternatively, re-engineer large parts of their project to get the structure right. C gives you the same choice at this point, but it may be more common to pick the unsafe path because memory safety is not valued high enough to justify the refactoring cost, so people often accept safety issues instead of fixing the design issues in the program.

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

#329

Post by littlestymaar »

cztomsik wrote: post #325
littlestymaar wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know hat makes you think I'm talking about disagreement, but that's not what I'm talking about, if one cannot help insulting people on a forum, then what they deserve is a ban. First a temporary one, then if they still can't behave then a permanent one. Loris is a bully, that's the problem, not his opinions.

Do you have any links? It's a bold statement, and I have not personally noticed anything like that (but I am also not actively following him anywhere)

I'm sorry I don't keep a track record.
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