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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

#71

Post by littlestymaar »

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.

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 from bullies from the beginning, they will turn your entire community to a miserable place. And that's a shame because from what I've seen, Andrew Kelley seems to be a very cool guy in addition to being very smart).

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

#72

Post by Dylan16807 »

pharrington wrote: post #61
HumanOstrich wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Cathedrals are the opposite of extreme beta mode with lots of breaking changes.

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

#73

Post by littlestymaar »

LambdaComplex wrote: post #26
ksec wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it is a trade off for between zig's development speed and documentation. It is Pre 1.0, extreme beta mode with lots of breaking changes. Generally speaking I think it is the right trade off for now. Purely inferring from Andrew and the Zig's team online character as I don't know them in person, I think they do care a lot of DX, things like compiling speed and tools. So I think once 1.0 come I won't be surpris…

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?

Same as Rust being almost a decade old when the first 1.0 was published.

Making a programming language from scratch is a long endeavor when it's a one man project.

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

#74

Post by simonask »

flohofwoe wrote: post #58
simonask wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the argument is that it is also extremely difficult to write low level libraries in Zig, just as it is in C. You will just only notice the difficulty at some later point after writing the code, potentially in production.

> low level libraries in Zig, just as it is in C Did you write any Zig code yet? In terms of enforced correctness in the language (e.g. no integer promotion, no implicit 'dangerous' casts, null-safety, enforced error handling, etc...) and runtime safety (range-, nullptr-, integer-overflow-checks etc...), Zig is much closer to Rust than it is to C and C++. It "just" doesn't solve static memory safety and some (admitte…

I mean, there's no question that Zig, also in its current state, is vast improvement over C or even C++ - for the "small stuff". It is much more pleasant to use.

But there is still the "big stuff" - the things that have a fundamental, architectural impact. Things like: Will my program be multithreaded? Will I have many systems that interact? Will my program be maximally memory-efficient? Do I have the capacity (or money) to ensure correctness if I say "yes" to any of that?

The most important consideration in any software project is managing architectural complexity. Zig is better, yes, but not a paradigm shift. If you say "yes" to any of the above, you are in the same world of pain (or expenses) as you would be in C or C++. This is the reason that Rust is interesting: It makes things feasible/cheap that were previously very hard/expensive, at a fundamental level.

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

#75

Post by simonask »

sothatsit wrote: post #21
8s2ngy wrote: post #10

I’m sorry, but any non-trivial Zig code gives me PTSD flashbacks of C. I don’t understand who Zig is targeting: with pervasive mutability, manual allocation, and a lack of proper sum types, it feels like a step back from languages such as Rust. If it is indeed a different way to write code, one that embraces default memory unsafety, why would I choose it over C, which has decades of work behind it? Am I missing some…

I love Zig precisely because it is so similar to C. Honestly, if you don't like C, I can totally understand why you wouldn't like Zig. But I love C, and I love Zig. Zig has become my go-to for projects where I would previously have reached for C, largely because Zig has such good compatibility with other C projects. Rust, on the other hand, is a completely different beast. It is very different from C, and it is far m…

C is entirely as complicated as Rust, if your goal is to write correct software that doesn't crash all the time. It's only a syntactically simple language. Actually making anything interesting with it is _not_ simple.

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

#76

Post by porridgeraisin »

LAC-Tech wrote: post #47
konart wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>People do systems programming in rust, but that's not really what most of the community is doing. As someone who haven't done any systems programming after university: wait, what? I was under impression that this is exactly what people where doing with Rust.(system apps, even linux kernel, no?) If not - what do they (most if the community) are doing with Rust?

Web servers, games, and applications, that sort of thing. Some people definitely do systems programming in, but it's a minority. The std library is not set up for it at all, you need something like rustix, but even that results in very unidiomatic ("unsafe") rust code. In Zig it's all in the std library by default. Because it's a systems programming language, first and foremost.

Actually I was also under OPs impression... can you tell me few specific problems with using rust for systems programming? BTW, I have only ever done something that resembles systems programming in C.

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

#77

Post by flohofwoe »

hardwaresofton wrote: post #50
chrisandchris wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Contributions to the Zig language or contributions to software using Zig (the latter is the one the post is about as I understand)? If so, I believe Zig will stay within a niche. Lower entry barriers allow "script kiddies" to easily start withe language, and they eventually will become leading engineers. Only a few people tend to go straight for the highest practice without "playing around". IMHO the reason, why PHP…

> Contributions to the Zig language or contributions to software using Zig (the latter is the one the post is about as I understand)? Yes. I think a contributor that really wanted to help the ecosystem would start in the stdlib and then start moving outwards. Even if it was LLM-assisted, I think it could be high value. IIRC Loris already has an engine for building websites with Zig, but making sure that every Zig lib…

> already has an engine for building websites with Zig, but making sure that every Zig library has docs

Tbh, this sort of auto-generated docs from source code is not all that useful, since you get that same information right in the IDE via the language server.

The important documentation part that's currently missing is how everything is supposed to work together in the stdlib, not the 'micro-documentation' of what a single type or function does. And for this sort of information it's currently indeed better to look at example code (e.g. the stdlib's testing code).

IMHO it's way too early for this type of high-level documentation, since things change all the time in the stdlib. Putting much work into documenting concepts that are discarded again anyway doesn't make much sense.

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

#78

Post by kristoff_it »

simonask wrote: post #52
jedisct1 wrote: post #30

The new I/O interface makes printing a simple “Hello, world!” more complicated, but once you get used to it, the design is actually very clean, versatile, and future-proof. Since 0.15, though, I feel too dumb for Zig’s ArrayList.

Is it future-proof though? Last I saw, it relied on some yet-to-be-determined design for compiling async variants of everything that uses IO, and it was still unclear whether it was possible at all to support dynamic dispatch. My info could be outdated - I don't follow Zig very closely, but I am curious.

The Reader/Writer changes are perfectly compatible with the upcoming async I/O stuff and you won't need to change any code that just deals with streams.

No promises about potential future changes though :^)

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

#80

Post by kristoff_it »

simonask wrote: post #45
ozgrakkurt wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compared to C: Discriminated unions, error handling, comptime, defer. Better default integer type casting, ability to choose between releaseSafe/releaseFast And probably other things. As for comparison to Rust, you do want very low level memory handling for writing databases as an example. It is extremely difficult to write low level libraries in Rust

I think the argument is that it is also extremely difficult to write low level libraries in Zig, just as it is in C. You will just only notice the difficulty at some later point after writing the code, potentially in production.

> I think the argument is that it is also extremely difficult to write low level libraries in Zig, just as it is in C.

This has been not my experience at all in the ~6 years I've been writing Zig. I started having very little experience writing C (<1000, lines all written while in university) and since day 1 Zig has been a tremendous improvement over it, even back when it was at version 0.4.0.

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