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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

#61

Post by hawk_ »

messe wrote: post #58
hawk_ wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is amazing to me that you can do this in Zig code directly as opposed to messing with the compiler.

To be fair, this can be done in GNU C as well. Like the Zig implementation, you'd still have to use inline assembly.

> If this was done the classical C way, you would always have to stack-save a number of registers

I see, so you're saying that GCC can be coaxed into gathering only the relevant registers to stack and unstack not blindly do all of them?

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

#62

Post by kunley »

pjmlp wrote: post #54
lukaslalinsky wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Also, it is about time to let go with GC-phobia. https://www.withsecure.com/en/solutions/innovative-security-... https://www.ptc.com/en/products/developer-tools/perc Note the > This video illustrates the use case of Perc within the Aegis Combat System, a digital command and control system capable of identifying and tracking incoming threats and providing the war fighter with a solution to address threats. Aegis, deve…

GC is fine, what scaries me is using j*va in Aegis..

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

#63

Post by lukaslalinsky »

hawk_ wrote: post #55
lukaslalinsky wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this was done the classical C way, you would always have to stack-save a number of registers, even if they are not really needed. The only difference here is that the compiler will do the save for you, in whatever way fits the context best. Sometimes it will stack-save, sometimes it will decide to use a different option. It's always strictly better than explicitly saving/restoring N registers unaware of the contex…

This is amazing to me that you can do this in Zig code directly as opposed to messing with the compiler.

See https://github.com/alibaba/PhotonLibOS/blob/2fb4e979a4913e68... for GNU C++ example. It's a tiny bit more limited, because of how the compilation works, but the concept is the same.

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

#64

Post by RossBencina »

pjmlp wrote: post #54
lukaslalinsky wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Also, it is about time to let go with GC-phobia. https://www.withsecure.com/en/solutions/innovative-security-... https://www.ptc.com/en/products/developer-tools/perc Note the > This video illustrates the use case of Perc within the Aegis Combat System, a digital command and control system capable of identifying and tracking incoming threats and providing the war fighter with a solution to address threats. Aegis, deve…

> Not all GCs are born alike.

True. However in the bounded-time GC space few projects share the same definitions of low-latency or real-time. So you have to find a language that meets all of your other desiderata and provides a GC that meets your timing requirements. Perc looks interesting, Metronome made similar promises about sub-ms latency. But I'd have to get over my JVM runtime phobia.

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

#65

Post by Ygg2 »

kunley wrote: post #62
pjmlp wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, it is about time to let go with GC-phobia. https://www.withsecure.com/en/solutions/innovative-security-... https://www.ptc.com/en/products/developer-tools/perc Note the > This video illustrates the use case of Perc within the Aegis Combat System, a digital command and control system capable of identifying and tracking incoming threats and providing the war fighter with a solution to address threats. Aegis, deve…

GC is fine, what scaries me is using j*va in Aegis..

The OutOfMemoryError will happen after rocket hits the target.

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

#66

Post by kunley »

grayhatter wrote: post #10
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?

IMO, it's very wrong. Zig's language is not drastically changing, it's adding a new, *very* powerful API, which similar to how most everything in zig passes an allocator as a function param, soon functions that want to do IO, will accept an object that will provide the desired abstraction, so that callers can define the ideal implementation. In other words, the only reason to not use zig if you detest upgrading or im…

Zealotry in almost every paragraph.

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

#67

Post by pjmlp »

RossBencina wrote: post #64
pjmlp wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, it is about time to let go with GC-phobia. https://www.withsecure.com/en/solutions/innovative-security-... https://www.ptc.com/en/products/developer-tools/perc Note the > This video illustrates the use case of Perc within the Aegis Combat System, a digital command and control system capable of identifying and tracking incoming threats and providing the war fighter with a solution to address threats. Aegis, deve…

> Not all GCs are born alike. True. However in the bounded-time GC space few projects share the same definitions of low-latency or real-time. So you have to find a language that meets all of your other desiderata and provides a GC that meets your timing requirements. Perc looks interesting, Metronome made similar promises about sub-ms latency. But I'd have to get over my JVM runtime phobia.

I consider one where human lifes depend on it, for good or worse depending on the side, real time enough.

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

#68

Post by d3ckard »

Honestly, have been excited about Zig for quite a while, dabbled a bit a while back and was waiting for it getting closer to 1.0 to actually do a deep dive... but that moment doesn't seem to come.

I don't mind, it's up to the maintainers on how they want to proceed. However, I would greatly appreciate if Zig news was a bit clearer on what's happening, timelines etc.

I think it takes relatively little time to do so, but optics would be so much better.

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

#69

Post by GoblinSlayer »

flimflamm wrote: post #46
messe wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The rest is handled by the compiler, instead of depending on the C calling convention, it can avoid having things in registers during yield. Yep, the frame pointer as well if you're using it. This is exactly how its implemented in user-space in Zig's WIP std.Io branch green-threading implementation: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/blob/ce704963037fed60a30fd9d4... On ARM64, only fp, sp and pc are explicitly restored;…

Is this just buttering the cost of switches by crippling the optimization options compiler have?

I wonder how you see it. Stackful coroutines switch context on syscall in the top stack frame, the deeper frames are regular optimized code, but syscall/sysret is already big context switch. And read/epoll loop has exactly same structure, the point of async programming isn't optimization of computation, but optimization of memory consumption. Performance is determined by features and design (and Electron).

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

#70

Post by secondcoming »

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.…

> callback-based async seems to have become the standard

At some level it's always callbacks. Then people build frameworks on top of these so programmers can pretend they're not dealing with callbacks.

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