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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

#61

Post by pharrington »

HumanOstrich wrote: post #31
LambdaComplex wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

What's the benchmark for how long something can be pre-1.0? Seems like a nonsense argument.

There is no benchmark. As a species, we don't even know know what a good programming language is, let alone how to reliably develop one. This stuff takes time, and we're all learning it together.

I like to compare this to real world cathedral building. There are some cathedrals that are literally taking centuries to build! It's OK if the important, but difficult thing takes a long time to build.

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

#62

Post by rjh29 »

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 intentional. They don't want to attract low-commitment beginners while the language is heavily changing (and explicitly in beta). Such people will ask questions and ask for documentation but contribute nothing.

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

#63

Post by rjh29 »

viraptor wrote: post #57
geon wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can’t expect documentation this early. The new interface was just released.

In serious codebases docs are not an afterthought. There's lots of places where you're expected to add both a new interface and docs together.

It's pre-1.0 beta. Nothing has been 'released' yet .

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

#64

Post by wordofx »

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

Na. It’s flat out laziness. Don’t make excuses. Either write docs or stop worrying code.

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

#65

Post by keyle »

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.

That would hurt adoption. I understand things move fast but if you want people to make the switch other than hello world, it has to be at a minimum cosy. Sending them to hell and find your way out isn't a good move long term.

I tried Zig a couple of times and I got that feeling: very powerful and clever language but not really for me, I don't have the headspace, sorry. I need something I can debug after an 8 hours dayjob, a commute and having put the kids to bed. It better be inviting & fun! (Hi, C).

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

#66

Post by pharrington »

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…

I'm not a Zig developer, but I imagine one reason why the Zig documentation is so spartan is because the language is still young and constantly evolving. It's really hard to devote the time and energy to writing documentation when you know that what you've written will just be wrong at some uncertain point in the future.

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

#67

Post by pjmlp »

sshine wrote: post #55
benreesman wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bette…

> "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. I doubt it. I'm teaching a course on C this fall. As textbook I've chosen "Modern C" by Jens Gustedt (updated for C23). I'm asked by students "Why don't you choose K&R like everyone else?" And while the book is from 1978 (ANSI C edition in 1988)…

Kudos for going with modern C practices.

There is a place to learn about history of computing, and that is where K&R C book belongs to.

Not only is the old way, this is from the age of dumb C compilers, not taking advantage of all stuff recent standards allow compiler writers to take to next level on optimizations, not always with expected results.

Maybe getting students to understand the ISO C draft is also an interesting exercise.

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

#68

Post by [deleted] »

aDyslecticCrow wrote: post #32
virtualritz wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

Ai is great at block comments, there is no excuse. Add to that a small anotated usage example written by a human and this whole post would have not existed. Lack of docs also cripple AI from understanding, so future adoption becomes even more bleak. If an api or library developer didnt bother doing even bare minimum docs, my confidence in the library drops aswell. Did they skip testing aswell? Ran the happy path for…

[deleted]

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

#69

Post by Dylan16807 »

HumanOstrich wrote: post #31
LambdaComplex wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

What's the benchmark for how long something can be pre-1.0? Seems like a nonsense argument.

It's the combination of pre-1.0 and having rapid development speed that is being questioned here. And it's a good question, not nonsense.

If you keep up the development pace you're going to approach stability. Unless you're in a manic spiral of rewrites.

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

#70

Post by wordofx »

geon wrote: post #54
ulbu wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i find that zig is too oriented at doling out directives for what not to do instead of just collecting and teaching variants of how and what to do. the lack of documentation on this interface is a sore case in point.

You can’t expect documentation this early. The new interface was just released.

So zig isn’t a serious language. It’s just some trash apis thrown together.
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