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Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

raymyers.org

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Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#641

Post by ozgrakkurt »

blacksqr wrote: post #635

I have found myself wondering a lot lately about the alternative universe where all the effort and resources devoted to developing and using AI coding and debugging agents were instead simply dedicated to fuzzing human-generated code. How would the code quality and total usefulness of the results have compared?

It should have been possible to build a new LLVM alternative, a new chromium like browser and some other similar things imo and that would have been definitely more impactful for me.

It is unimaginable how many static analysis tools or fuzzers could have been created with a fraction of LLM investment too.

For example honggfuzz was created by a single engineer possibly in less than a years’s worth time

Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#642

Post by baq »

hatefulheart wrote: post #231
p-e-w wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think the Zig people are really just concerned that maybe Zig itself is a DOA language because it doesn't offer enough over C for any serious use and their flagship project has now abandoned it. You hit the nail on the head there. Zig is 10 years old now and it’s pretty clear that the industry isn’t biting, compared to the behemoth that is Rust. Between Rust, C, and C++ there is very little room for another langu…

Python was invented two years before Java and didn’t move the needle until the mid 2010s. You are the typical mark for hype cycles. Get a clue will you.

I was getting paid doing django in 2005-2006

Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#643

Post by nozzlegear »

moomoo11 wrote: post #463
cropcirclbureau wrote: post #55

I stand with Andrew. As someone who's been following Sumner's work closely for years, Kelley's accusations are very much true even if unkind. While the results are useful and cool, it a wankfluencer op from start to finish. I dare you to refute thus. And I say all this as someone who does agentic development 8hrs a day and someone who always pestered my team to opt for Rust and Deno instead of Node. Call a spade a sp…

i appreciate people saying it like it is. like linus lol i hate marketing pr speak when it comes to technical things. save that for the non technical customers

Didn't Linus famously say that he regretted his behavior, that making things personal was not okay, and that he needed to change some of his behavior?

Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#644

Post by ksec »

metoobruh wrote: post #552
Aurornis wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you don't intend to write misleading stuff that makes Zig look bad What misleading stuff? Makes Zig look bad how? The posts I read were appreciative to Zig. The only “misleading” piece of either blog post that I recall was the Andrew Kelley claim that Bun wasn’t fuzzing, which was easily refuted by pointing to their fuzzing work. If there’s something more then I’d like to see it, but every time I ask nobody can…

[flagged]

No where did they show it makes Zig looks bad. And neither did any Reddit, HN, Twitter thread by a large have anyone said anything like that.

Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#645

Post by antonvs »

budsniffer952 wrote: post #491
cropcirclbureau wrote: post #55

I stand with Andrew. As someone who's been following Sumner's work closely for years, Kelley's accusations are very much true even if unkind. While the results are useful and cool, it a wankfluencer op from start to finish. I dare you to refute thus. And I say all this as someone who does agentic development 8hrs a day and someone who always pestered my team to opt for Rust and Deno instead of Node. Call a spade a sp…

> Call a spade a spade, the rewrite was poorly justified In what world do you think they have to justify a rewrite to anyone outside their company? Bizarre mentality.

Exactly. The people criticizing the rewrite for the most part are just trying to exert power from the wrong end of a parasocial relationship. And then they get upset when no-one takes them seriously.

Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#646

Post by andriy_koval »

CamouflagedKiwi wrote: post #381

Interesting article, seems more balanced than Andrew Kelley's one that it links to. The thing I still think is wrong: why are Anthropic rewriting a Javascript runtime from Zig to Rust? Why not rewrite Claude Code itself in Rust (or Go or whatever, lots of options there) and drop Bun completely. That actually seems like an easier solution (rather than having to create a performant, correct Javascript runtime, just rew…

> why are Anthropic rewriting a Javascript runtime from Zig to Rust?

there is a chance they tried..

Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#647

Post by Klonoar »

lunar_mycroft wrote: post #393
herrkanin wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How is that better than the Zig codebase you started with? In contrast with the Zig codebase, you now have clear well-scoped unsafe boundaries you can iteratively fix one by one. This was not the case before.

Except that writing safe rust often requires designing the architecture around rust's ownership model, meaning a file by file, line by line translation doesn't necessarily leave you much closer to safe rust than you were at the start.

It’s fully possible to have scoped areas of borrow checker influence, which could be introduced after the port.

Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#648

Post by wavemode »

Xirdus wrote: post #565
wavemode wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say the exact opposite, actually - Zig is a language specifically suited for TigerBeetle's all-at-once approach to memory management, and the approach more commonly used in Rust (allocate wherever and whenever) is non-idiomatic in Zig. > only works for very specific use cases. It's not clear to me what you mean by this.

The funny thing is that Rust works perfectly fine with statically preallocated memory. It's not even against its idioms - most code will work with zero changes. In a way, the borrow checker is the perfect tool for this situation, since nothing owns any memory and everything is borrowed from the static allocation.

There's definitely one code change that's needed - you need to override the Allocator being used by standard library containers (or, live without standard library containers) and by any third-party dependencies you have. That feature is not even stable, let alone idiomatic.

Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#649

Post by RetroTechie »

Ygg2 wrote: post #301
hypfer wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because value of a project is not in the code produced. It's in the amount of battle-testing that code has seen. Rel: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

It's funny, but I think the article is showing it's age. It's no longer true. In hindsight having automated auto complete rewriting your code base wasn't something on 2000's radar. Now switching from language to language is much easier. Just for Rust, there was Ladybird and Bun complete rewrite, that ran into zero things that Joel rallied about.

> It's funny, but I think the article is showing it's age. It's no longer true.

Joel argues 2 effects:

# Developer & time-cost of a rewrite is a big unknown. That's still true, but LLMs may cut that down by a factor of 10x or more. You cut time & developer-hours by throwing tokens ($) at it. An optimist might say this cost has vanished.

# Shipping a rewritten product is -by itself- an unknown risk. That still holds. You can do all the testing you want, but your test suite != your clients environment(s? multiply by number of users or target platforms).

A single bug that pops up in the rewritten codebase (which wasn't in the old one) can hurt a vendor's reputation badly if the stars align just right.

All in all Joel's article held up pretty well (esp. given how long ago it was written).

Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#650

Post by nozzlegear »

vlaaad wrote: post #3

Did we read the same Anthropic and Andrew Kelly's posts? Anthropic is not in the programming language market; their post about rewriting Bun in Rust is full of technical details that led to improving the end product for their users. Zig's response is a sour opinion piece full of personal attacks. For context, I'm using Codex and have no interest in either Zig or Rust, so just observing this drama from the sidelines.

> Anthropic is not in the programming language market;

The article by Ray Myers makes the case that Anthropic is in the programming language market by way of them having a clear monetary stake in making their agents look supremely capable of all tasks, up to and including rewriting an entire Zig codebase to Rust.

From TFA:

> Anthropic is actively campaigning to end software engineering. They need you to believe they can do that. Well, maybe it’s not you that they need to convince. Maybe it’s your C-Suite, various world leaders, or the manager of your retirement fund. They’ve raised $132 billion in investment, and are approaching an IPO valued over $1 trillion. Since they cannot show profitability, this depends on selling their hypothetical future impact.

> In literary terms, Anthropic is an unreliable narrator.

> One of their key narratives is: Coding is going away, then the rest of software engineering, and eventually most other human labor. This kind of money behind this kind of story has an impact, regardless of how true we think the story is.

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