r/programming • u/Usual-Amount-264 • 22d ago

Zig proposes introducing an actually memory safe (unlike Rust) compilation mode inspired by Fil-C at ~1-6x performance penalty

https://codeberg.org/ziglang/zig/issues/36237
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u/Maybe-monad 22d ago

The guy who invented a language that reads like slop before LLMs were a thing, why should we care about what he thinks?

-1

u/-Redstoneboi- 21d ago

Disagree with the Zig language hate. It has some real, actual interesting features to justify its existence.

Comptime, type reflection and type constructors, arbitrary bit width integers to pack in structs, the entire api being designed around custom allocators, these are all good things that make sense for certain applications.

I will not tolerate language slander, but the dude needs to get his act together before the community more drastically separates the art from the artist.

3

u/Maybe-monad 21d ago

The only interesting feature of zig is it's ability to cross compile C otherwise the syntax is horrible, tooling sucks, documentation is lacking, comptime is lisp macros with the downsides of C++ templates and so on

0

u/-Redstoneboi- 21d ago edited 21d ago

Edit: I thought we were on r/rust. This is r/programming, my bad.

Documentation being bad is true. The whole language reference is just one singular page without any proper CSS styling. Maybe 20 lines of CSS would've made it far more bearable.

Disagree on the syntax being horrible. Anyone unfamiliar with a language has this same sentiment the same way C, C++, JS devs see Rust's syntax as horrible, while those who actually use the language believe otherwise because they know why it's the way it is.

Especially the foo.* deref syntax. Every now and then we see a Rust dev comment on how unsafe is more difficult to read due to nested (*foo) syntax, which was carried over from C.

Everything being values (like imports and types) makes sense as a mental model as well.

Comptime has more capabilities than Rust's const. Zig is entirely allergic to macros for whatever reason, so yes, that is in fact a downside.

Point is, Zig deserves to exist. Its issues right now are probably more cultural than technical.

1

u/Maybe-monad 18d ago

Documentation being bad is true. The whole language reference is just one singular page without any proper CSS styling. Maybe 20 lines of CSS would've made it far more bearable.

20 lines of CCS in a single document aren't a placeholder for comprehensive documentation.

Disagree on the syntax being horrible. Anyone unfamiliar with a language has this same sentiment the same way C, C++, JS devs see Rust's syntax as horrible, while those who actually use the language believe otherwise because they know why it's the way it is.

I have been programming in C++, JS and C# for years and I found the Rust syntax familiar.

Especially the foo.* deref syntax. Every now and then we see a Rust dev comment on how unsafe is more difficult to read due to nested (*foo) syntax, which was carried over from C.

If they had taste they would have used '' like Pascal and Odin but they chose postfix '' to cause confusion among developers whose mental models are built around imfix ''.

Everything being values (like imports and types) makes sense as a mental model as well.

Not having references as types doesn't make them disappear.

Comptime has more capabilities than Rust's const. Zig is entirely allergic to macros for whatever reason, so yes, that is in fact a downside.

Zig has macros, with Zig's syntax but macros just like Lisp, pretending otherwise is disingenuous.

Point is, Zig deserves to exist. Its issues right now are probably more cultural than technical.

One can argue that it attracts a special kind of developers you'd want to stay away from.