Open-source Zig book

Post by pron » Wed, Nov 19, 2025, 5:24 PM UTC

LexiMax wrote: post #420

pron wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's the implementation that's delaying Zig's stabilisation, but the design. I'm also not sure comptime makes the implementation all that complicated. Lisp macros are more powerful than comptime (comptime is weaker by design) and they don't make Lisp implementation complicated.

Fair. I'm not a compiler developer, so I'll defer to your expertise on that front. That being said, I suppose my ultimate wonder is how small a Zig implementation could possibly be, if code size and implementation simplicity was the priority. In other words, could a hypothetical version of the Zig language have existed in the 80's or 90's, or was such a language simply out of reach of the computers of the time.

Post by Zambyte » Thu, Nov 20, 2025, 4:22 PM UTC

jamiejquinn wrote: post #422

Zambyte wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big thing I would say I actually learned and would intentionally apply to other languages is SIMD programming. Otherwise, I'd say it gave me a much clearer mental model of memory management that helps me understand other languages much more fundamentally. Along with getting my hands directly on custom allocators for the first time, a question that took me time to figure out but gave me a lot of clarity in answeri…

Snap! I also played around with closures a tonne in Zig. Definitely possible but not... ergonomic. Haven't ended up using them much. And agree with allocators; in C I always considered using custom allocators but never really needed to. Having them just available in the zig std means I actually use them. The testing allocator is particularly useful IMO. Never used Go but if it's Zig-like I might give it a shot! Thank…

    - structs and functions are the main means of composition
    - the pattern of: allocate resource, immediately defer deallocating the resource
    - errors are values, handled very similarly (multiple return values vs error unions)
    - built in json  struct support
    - especially with the 0.16.0 Io changes in Zig, the concurrency story (std.Io.async[0] is equivalent to the go keyword[1], std.Io.Queue[2] is equivalent to channels[3], std.Io.select[4] is equivalent to the select keyword[5])
    - batteries included but not sprawling stdlib
    - git based dependencies
    - built in testing

Post by fuzztester » Mon, Nov 24, 2025, 4:27 AM UTC

59nadir wrote: post #391

fuzztester wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>actual mind changing aspects of the BEAM What are those aspects? newb to this area.

A few key things: - Leaning on a pre-emptive scheduler to maintain order even in the presence of ridiculous amounts of threads ("processes" on the BEAM) running - Using supervision trees to specify how and when processes and their dependents should be restarted - Using `gen_server` processes as a standard template for how a thread should be running There's more to mine from using the BEAM, but I think the above are s…